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Meta Quest 3

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253 pointsmfiguiere329 comments

So what’s the killer app?

Beatsaber and some other games can be a lot of fun, but they’re not new. What new experience are ready for this?

I get the quality is better, and that’s not nothing.

But other than that this largely seems like more of the same. VR still doesn’t seem to have advanced much in software to me. And Meta keeps pushing virtual meetings and such but that’s not my cup of tea.

I owned a Quest 2 and had some fun with it. I’ve owned previous headsets too. But I just don’t see anything that would makes me say “ooh I need that”.

This feels very “PC” to me. By which I mean they’re selling it because they can sell new hardware. The Pentium 9 is out! Which is fine.

But when Sony/Nintendo/MS want to sell a new console they put new and fancier games. They give you a specific reason to upgrade besides better specs. So you can play Horizon 12: We’re On The Moon Now. Or Bob’s Crazy Adventure. Whatever.

All this time and it still seems like the market is 95% games, and those aren’t advancing much beyond visuals. So I don’t feel like I’m really missing anything.

XBox cloud gaming is pretty big. Roblox is huge with kids as well.

+1. I don't have a TV, so if I could just stream my macOS desktop and Xbox Cloud Gaming (which I already use) to a virtual 50+' screen that follows me as I walk around, that will be enough for me to buy in.

https://www.immersed.com/

That seems to reinforce my point to me.

Both of those are available on other platforms. They don’t need the Quest 3.

Why not just buy an Xbox?

What makes me need a Quest 3?

You can play games on lower resolution, lower refresh monitors, so why do people market higher resolution and particularly higher refresh rate monitors succesfully to gamers? Quality if experience, not just binary “can you minimally do it”, matters, and matters particularly to the segment of the market that has lots of disposable income.

You can buy an XBox, but you won't be able to do anything VR related with it, so not sure what your point is.

It sounds like you've convinced yourself you don't need the quest, so just don't worry about it?

There's a bunch of very powerful/ successful AI girlfriend apps like Replika. I think that will be a breakthrough use case for VR.

How successful are those virtual girlfriend apps?

Last I checked, they removed a bunch of capabilities from Replika which caused a massive uproar on their subreddit and facebook.

Indeed. Based on "How angry are people when something is changed?", they seem to be pretty successful.

Which makes sense, what you remember LLMs are magic boxes that tell you what they think you want to hear.

If all the recent LLM stuff is any indication, I can't imagine they'll be very good. I think we've got a few decades to go before that can be anything other than a novelty.

If that’s the killer app for VR, then all I can say is god help VR.

Really? "All the lonely people..."

"Virtual Relationships"

>So what’s the killer app?

I feel like the answer to that question will come next year, when Apple's Vision Pro is out.

Which won't release applications for the quest?

Yes, but competition

What if they can’t? What if whatever it is that makes the app so compelling automatically rules it out on the Quest 3 for some reason? What if it demands a better input method or higher resolution?

Then I'd be impressed, frankly. I've got the original Quest, and features you'd expect to be broken or missing (eg. hand tracking, multitasking, game streaming, web browsing, sideloading, et. al) all work fine.

It's honestly quite sad that the core line of rhetoric here is a laconic "what if" statement around theoretical apps. The Quest exists and has sold tens of millions of units; the Vision Pro has yet to prove itself. Unless you have a specific example, this can only be interpreted as wishcasting.

The quest sold millions at the beginning of a pandemic when people were trapped at home and needed an escape.

How many people still use it? How many regret the purchase, how many would have bought it without the pandemic?

I see that as Meta’s big opportunity to grab success in VR. And it didn’t happen.

They’re trying to market this like the next thing everyone needs and after multiple tries I just don’t see it. I don’t even see how they get there, this is the same strategy as the Quest, Quest 2, PSVR, PSVR2, etc. Games are great but that pitch just isn’t working at really moving the needle. But that’s all they have.

Games moved 20+ million units. That's 'the needle', unless your goal is to depose the iPhone. And clearly Meta is content to leave it alone, since the Quest even has an iOS companion app. They're complimentary products, not cannibalistic.

On the other hand, I can guarantee that most people who already own an iPhone will regret buying a Vision Pro. It's too expensive and too redundant to matter as a piece of hardware. It's not a market-redefining release like the Quest was, nor is it a proprietary solution to unfixable problems. It's an expensive thing, and for most people the Quest value proposition will align long before the Vision Pro value proposition does. The Hololens already tried this avenue too; merely offering a premium version of mixed reality doesn't work (even when the military is your customer).

It'll be years before the dust settles, but the Quest has gotten undeniably far on it's own. You can rationalize that success however you want, but you'll consistently be confused if you hold it to unproven standards like "spatial computing". For me, the Quest is the first Facebook product I've used where I can understand the vision at a consumer level and from a top-down level.

But that won’t help Meta.

This really feels like a Quest 2 + 1, which is fine. Same but better specs.

But the site appears to me like it’s positioning it as a Vision Pro competitor when it’s not even in the same league. “We have AR too so it’s the same!” The Vision Pro seems very clearly marketed at a different segment and primary use case to me.

The problem is that if Apple (or a 3rd party on the platform) figures it out I think there’s a good chance it can’t work well on a significantly cheaper headset like the Quest 3.

Then the Quest 3 may be the cheap thing that doesn’t do what people want. Like when you didn’t get an XBox 360 at Christmas because mom/dad got you a $25 TV plug-in Pac-Man game because “it’s the same thing”.

But Meta wants in on the party. And I feel like they’re trying to get their sales before the Vision Pro comes out and immediately becomes the thing that they get very unfavorably compared to (except price). Just like they rushed out a pre-announcement this was coming around the Vision Pro announcement.

Even if Apple face plants or never finds “it”and the Vision Pro isn’t successful I don’t see Meta being either. All these years and it’s still kind of “eh”.

Shooting to be the Android to Apple's Apple in this market doesn't seem like the least sensible strategy.

I feel like the "killer app problem" is not unique to the Quest, but the whole VR ecosystem. I'm being cautiously optimistic Apple will finally break through and find an app that will appeal to the masses, and even though the price is not attainable for 95% of the population, that will trickle down and find it's way to the broader market.

I agree fully. It’s not unique to the Quest. They’re just the most successful player so far (I think).

Apple isn’t target VR (though it works), they’re trying something different. So I’m curious if it succeeds.

As stated before, YMMV, because the killer apps for me have been iRacing and DCS in VR. If you aren't into simulation games, VR isn't really there yet for your genre. FPS's are getting there, kinda. Your brain still has to remind your body to crouch. Beatsaber, tennis, there's some novelty games but if you're asking yourself why would you buy VR, you already answered your own question. You shouldn't. Apple's headset, like the iPhone, will take some time to get apps working and finding their market fit. I do have hopes that Apple's headset brings VR into a more "stable" marketplace. Instead of just the few niche titles here and there that you play with Valve's headset or Oculus/Meta Quest.

Simulation games will ALWAYS benefit from more VR, more hardware, more wheels, more human interface controls.

Are there any good sites for tracking "use this for this" with relation to VR?

I feel like this is what I really want to know. "I built a custom car cockpit, and use it, and it's awesome"

when teh apple vision comes out? CAD software!!

I guess better AR support could allow some new types of things eventually but that probably won’t take off until you can walk around with in in daily life without it being awkward and uncomfortable

> This feels very “PC” to me. By which I mean they’re selling it because they can sell new hardware. The Pentium 9 is out! Which is fine.

I mean, the same is happening for smartphones and tablets. Yes, it won’t dramatically grow the market.

But those already have mass market acceptance. They’re not trying to prove they’re necessary. The iPhone (and other smartphones) literally changed the world. There’s only so much they can innovate after 15 years of record breaking success.

VR doesn’t have that. People weren’t chomping at the bit for the day it was 20% better. Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.

Yes, and I don’t expect this to change much in the foreseeable future, given current technological constraints. But why would you expect a third-generation product to suddenly change this?

It’s a bit shocking mostly because of the scale of investment.

Meta alone has spent $36B on VR. To put this in perspective, iPhone development cost $3.6B. It’s the fastest, largest single investment into a new technology. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

For the cost of this object, we could have built 3 new subway lines in NYC WITHOUT dealing with our cost disease.

For the cost of the object, you could set up a university program to figure out Anglo cost disease, then build ~10 subway lines at Japanese costs.

Asking why our society funds things the way they do is a very reasonable and responsible question

As a slightly less wonky comparison, the entire market cap of Delta (the largest airline in the world by market cap) last year was $23B, so Facebook could've just outright purchased Delta and still had over $10B left over.

And then they could have gotten Delta to build a virtual reality headset!

(And possibly gotten a better outcome, seeing as Delta has a helluva lot more experience than Facebook with ergonomics and normal people)

This is misleading. $36B is for all of Reality Labs, which includes Virtual Reality, but also their Augmented Reality glasses in development, Ray-Ban smart glasses, Horizon, Meta's AI org, the Portal product line (now discontinued), the unreleased smart watch, tons of R&D, etc.

> Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.

Depends on what you mean by relevance, 20 million Quest units have been sold which is more than Wii U lifetime sales (13.5 million), and about equals lifetime Gamecube sales and current Xbox Series S/X sales.

I'm sure it's not meeting expectations given how much they have subsidized them and how much they've spent on the metaverse, but I'm not sure I'd say the Quest itself is irrelevant. There's clearly an appetite for it.

My personal killer app was enjoying the LiDAR imagery in Google Earth VR. Wish that it was actively developed and released for standalone.

GeForce Now.

> So what’s the killer app? the porn app automatically locks the doors of your house to stop people "disturbing you"

I use my Quest 2 for mostly streaming from my PC games likes Asserto Corsa.

But... but... they made sure to put Gorilla Tag on the little games graphic... that doesn't do it for you?

Similar to the vision pro the killer app will eventually be AR.

Its pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.

Not sure if Quest 3 is there yet, but they're iterating towards it.

There's an underlying issue with the whole AR screen thing. They're heavily limited by the resolution of the screen in the goggles itself. These have a bit over half a 4k display per eye so you can only really have display resolutions of some fraction of that determined by what fraction of the area of a given eye display the fake screen takes up. If you blow it up until you're only looking at a portion of the screen you can have a larger one but then you're stuck to moving your head around to see your whole monitor. It's one of the big issues with the whole AR screen idea we'll need pretty beefy hardware to work around.

> It’s pretty obvious that virtual TV/Computer screens at arbitrary sizes/distances in arbitrary environments will simply be a better UX than physical monitors.

Is it? I don’t feel like it’s better right now (I know some people do, but I’m not convinced they’re the majority). Fixing the issues with VR is not trivial. There’s some deep flaws in the optics that we simply don’t know how to solve yet, and the weight needs to go down by a lot. I’m not sure I’d ever be comfortable wearing them more than a couple of hours when they’re entirely closed… but that’s a hard requirement for a good experience. There’s a bunch of hard contradictions in making good VR/AR.

Remember that as VR technology improves, so will monitors.

Couldn’t virtualized monitors be customizable in a declarative way which would enable you to do stuff which would be completely impossible on hardware, though? Imagine i3wm with dynamic virtual hardware, that’s insane, not to mention what kinds of automated monitor setup configuration transitions you could make.

AR guy many years from now can instantly try a new 12-monitor setup while our dumb butts wait for 12 expensive things in the mail and then wire them all up. Oh, wouldn’t it be cool to have 16? More waiting. But nobody buys that many monitors. If it was just a number in a text file, people might try out a 16 monitor setup just for no reason.

The difference in capability could be massive, to the point we’d be truly amazed to jump into the future of AR. Not to mention the freedom of hands free portability, it could be wizard levels of awesomeness!

> Couldn’t virtualized monitors be customizable in a declarative way which would enable you to do stuff which would be completely impossible on hardware, though? Imagine i3wm with dynamic virtual hardware, that’s insane, not to mention what kinds of automated monitor setup configuration transitions you could make.

Ok. Let’s say that’s done. Is it really that much more useful? It has to be good enough to overcome the friction of having to wear a headset and any limitations that come with it like heat, battery life, weight, resolution, etc.

I’m not convinced such a setup would significantly enhance productivity/usability even with hypothetical glasses that do it all, let alone something like a Quest on your head.

Is that pretty obvious? Better in what contexts?

I've seen someone here say that they really liked working with a virtual display from wherever, but the resolution of their whole display was 1080p. As someone who regularly uses dual 4k external monitors plus my laptop, I didn't understand how they could be productive. E.g. I may want to keep a browser with docs and a jupyter notebook of a particular investigation on my left, and an IDE of my repo on my right, plus chat with the colleague I'm working with below on my laptop, and all showing a lot of text or perhaps detailed graphs. If 8k monitors cross my affordability threshold before XR headsets with 4k (per eye) cross my affordability threshold, I would likely switch to more physical-screen pixels than to cut down to just 4k pixels strapped to my face.

Portability is an obvious pros for virtual displays. It can be used on any hotels only with less than 1kg HMD and accessories.

I agree that's pretty obvious when it gets there. I think we just disagree on how far we are from that point. I think there's essentially no chance that the Quest 3 is good enough, and would put the hypothetical over/under[0] on that happening somewhere around 15-20 years out. The software to take full advantage of it isn't there either, and I don't think it can be meaningfully developed at all until the hardware is a lot closer.

[0]- Since we're on HN, I need to say -- this is a figure of speech. I am not offering or soliciting any actual wagers here.

When Valve releases a stand-alone headset that can play regular PC VR games that will be what changes the VR market. Until then it'll be just, "more of the same." Minor improvements/evolution, etc.

Biggest thing the industry could do in order to move VR/AR forwards would be to adopt SteamOS or a similar "normal" Linux OS and give end users root. That would really be a kick in the ass towards real innovation more than, "slightly better tracking; slightly lighter; now with color pass through!"

You can do this with the Quest 2 right now via AirLink. I do it all the time.

You're talking about streaming/remote control of a PC which can involve significant latency and lag spikes (unless you're tethered with a good USB cable). That is by definition not a stand-alone headset. You're just using it as a fancy VR dongle.

This necessitates two things:

    * Your PC is powerful enough to run VR games
    * Your PC is in an area that's convenient to play (with plenty of room)

Nearly all Quest 2 users are using it stand-alone. They're not hooking it up to a PC. There's a tiny fraction of users that do the PC VR thing with Steam but that's so small as to be negligible in the overall market.

You're actually kind of making my point: Imagine if you didn't need the PC or the tether and could just play those great, easy-to-mod PC VR games directly on the headset. The market for VR would undergo a massive, positive change.

I'd also like to point out that tethering limits the fun you can have! Example: https://replay.beatleader.xyz/?scoreId=7668607

You can't play Beat Saber like that if you're tethered.

If you don't have a PC powerful enough for VR then you're probably not going to drop a lot of money on a combined PC+VR headset either.

I bought a cheapish wifi router to use for dedicated AirLink and I do SteamVR -> Quest 2. It works great. No latency (but I will admit the very occasional lag spike, it doesn't bother me and I don't miss a note while Beat Saber is going super fast, so it can't be that bad)

Yes, you do need a gaming PC. I got a gaming laptop for like $2400 AUD 3 years ago and it's going great with VR (and Starfield on Ultra, not in VR)

"The very occasional lag spike" completely destroys the ability to play Beat Saber. It'll drive you crazy (as it did me)!

...and I too tried dedicating my Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Wireless Long-Range Access Point (U6-LR-US) just for the headset to see if that would improve things (set it up with a new hotspot name so it'd be dedicated and only told the headset about it). The Wifi AP was on the wall just about 3 feet from my head and I still got the occasional lag spikes and I confirmed that they were due to the Wifi network (not just rendering spikes on my PC).

There's just too much random interference on the 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz bands for it to be buttery smooth. I suppose I could turn my house into a Faraday cage and that might improve things :)

That's your experience. GP has had a different experience that works for them, and maybe would for others.

> * Your PC is powerful enough to run VR games

So you want powerful enough PC on your head? It's impossible for everyone. Valve doesn't make a chip. Even for Apple, their chip is great but not comparable with powerful GeForce.

The CPU/GPU part of the device does not need to go on your head. Manufacturers make it that way for convenience (and lower part count) but that doesn't necessitate that stand-alone headsets be made like that. Apple, for example has the battery in a separate little dongle that you're supposed to put in your pocket. If they can do that there's no reason they couldn't put the CPU/GPU hardware elsewhere too.

The Steam Deck can play some VR games just fine. It just wasn't made for that purpose so as it stands it's currently sub-optimal. With a few minor changes that very same chip/hardware could make a decent VR headset.

>and give end users root.

I like the idea but the vast majority of people buying smartphones don't have root and it rarely bothers them.

Hackers can build an ecosystem. So it doesn’t really matter what the vast majority do imho.

The year of the linux desktop!

>So what’s the killer app?

There isn't one and there never will be because people like different things.

Why do people like you constantly say "what's the killer app" ever time something new VR comes out? I've been doing VR since oculus dk1 and VR has been crazy enjoyable from time to time. VR is cheap as hell now. Quest2 was $300 for quite some time even before the Quest3.

If you can't find enjoyment with virtual reality from a $300 stand alone device that's a you problem.

> Why do people like you constantly say "what's the killer app" ever time something new VR comes out?

It’s asking for the use case. If there isn’t a use case outside gaming, there is no value on the table for non-gamers.

Gaming is a huge market, and if you go in to any free to play game it's absolutely inundated with kids/preteens.

You can also roam using apps that let you do Google street view stuff in VR, create art, watch movies in a theater like experience alone or by yourself, and of course a lot of people use it for porn.

Even usual non-gamers love stuff like Walkabout Mini Golf or Star Wars Pinball.

Gaming is a huge market.

What portion of that market is VR?

That’s the issue I see. Gaming may be the best thing in VR, but VR hasn’t felt necessary to the average gamer at all. It’s still a small niche.

>It’s still a small niche

So what? Go play and enjoy.

>VR hasn’t felt necessary to the average gamer

Not even sure what that means. You come across as someone who likes to complain and never actually enjoy something. Good luck with that.

I miss the Google Cardboard I used to revisit places I traveled to, is there an app that really give access to Google Street View on the Quest 2?

Yep, there are. Wander is one, though I think there are others. You can even do it multiplayer, which is how my wife and I use it.

Ah, I heard about Wander before but when I looked into it I wasn't sure you could really see all the pictures from anywhere on Google Street View. Thanks!

For the price i would consider it as an alternative to buying a new PC screen. If it allows that.

There's no way you wouldn't have a massive headache wearing that 8-12 hours a day?

I've watched Netflix movies with no issues. The max session time I've ever done in VR is about 4 hours but that was playing a game and had no issues except the imprint from the headset in my forehead... I definitely know people that can't play at all without feeling sick though so ymmv.

only 12 hours? :)

Fair point.

I play VR shooters for 3-6 hours most days of the week.

What’s the killer app for a PC?

Originally, it was Excel/Lotus 123.

Later, it was the web browser.

Nowadays, it's mostly games.

Seems its excel again lol, they're bringing MS office to the quest

I'd say I exclusively used the Go and the Quest I've had to play games

Web browser and Excel are still killer apps for PC. There's way more PCs used for that, than for games.

Yeah - Excel and other 'productivity' apps are probably still the killer apps for PCs, especially for businesses. I assume businesses still drive the majority of PC purchases.

Some other factoids:

There are >1B PC gamers (source: random articles on the web). I'm guessing the number of mobile gamers is 2-3B.

There aren't that many active Excel users. Even Google sheets (free) has only a few hundred million users.

Most web browsing is now done on mobile. The transition happened sometime ~2015 for most of the world and something like 2017 for 'developer markets'.

Right. It was Wordstar instead of a typewriter. VisiCalc instead of ledgers book. Photoshop. PageMaker or Quark Xpress. AutoCAD.

Over and over as computers got more powerful new killer apps appeared that changed the way people worked and the world did its business.

VR doesn’t appear to have anything like that. Just a small niche of the gaming market.

...and remember, the smartest people in the world (including some super-perceptive folks like Jaron Lanier) innovated in this space in the 1990s -- no one back then was able to come up with a "killer app" back then. The hardware has gotten smaller, and we have more pixels.

Are these changes fundamental improvements? Are they enough to unlock some brand-new killer app that nobody could even envision in 30 years ago?

I remain skeptical...

Exactly. I think Apple is doing something fundamentally different by emphasizing AR so much that they built the hardware around it with ultra-high resolution screen and no controllers.

If something can enable that next step, I think that may be it.

But I really question if that will ever pass being a niche product. VR may just never have a popular use besides some gaming. I’m not sure AR in a headset has a big future either. Some specialty applications sure. But common?

> VR still doesn’t seem to have advanced much in software to me.

Let's put our imaginations together. What use case for VR do we all wish we could see/can we think of that we don't see yet?

I want to walk into my back yard and visualize a new garden, then check on it through the year and get info on what the plants need. Same thing with my house and layout/furniture. Let me stand in a hotel room in a city I'm not familiar with and look around at the town around me, x-ray style.

> I want to walk into my back yard

Aren't the VR headsets wired?

No, Quests are mobile, that's why they have such low processing power

Some can be used standalone, like the Quest.

Quest 2 grew the VR market by ~10x. What was the killer app? Beat Saber is the first install, but not what kept it going for 3 years.

It's the ecosystem. VR Chat for some, social game for others, immersive experiments like Bonelab, and a few studio titles.

I'm glad Meta didn't hype the Quest 3 too much. It's easy for VR expectations to outrun current tech. VR seems to be in the trough of disillusionment where it's moving forward (2023 games are way more playable than 2021 games) but it's a slow burn. "Hey this isn't a step change" is probably right about the Quest 3, but I think also misses the bigger picture. It's a platform and people are still figuring out what to build on it.

Beat Saber is still hella fun. I know some people that just play that (but play it daily) on their Quest. I'm not sure Facebook is particularly happy about that, however, since those people aren't buying apps or making them much money (maybe just the occasional song pack).

I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.

honestly, if the quest weren't tied to an account I would have considered getting one just to play beat saber too. it's fun and you feel like you're getting exercise at the same time.

Beat Saber really is lots of fun. It really has that DDR vibe, and you don't need super expensive equipment to do it.

I only connected with my facebook account a few months ago, I guess was grandfathered in under the previous system until they nagged me to do it.

The song packs come out really slowly too. They've released just one song pack with 11 songs on it this year, the Queen one back in May, as well as added 10 songs to existing song packs. For a total of 21 songs total this year so far.

And 210 official songs since it first came out back in 2018.

Meanwhile the PCVR version has a ridiculous 65,000[1] custom songs made for it at this point.

Not sure why they can't get closer to the Rock Band model, where it released new songs all the time, and had 2,743 songs total (and 84 songs THIS YEAR according to Wikipedia[2]...had no idea there was even an actively supported Rock Band game out there still).

Beat Saber should be making them enough money to allow them to at least do double or triple what they're doing now.

[1]: https://bsaber.com/ultimate-guide-to-beat-saber-custom-songs...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_downloadable_songs_for...

I agree! But the modding...that is all legally dubious, it makes sense that Meta can't just release whatever song they want. I wish it could be attached to spotify or something: you get to listen to the song because you have a subscription, and just play custom beat saber levels with it.

Heck, I would be happy if they just were able to do as well as Konami did with DDR. But Meta seems to be taking a slow growth approach on Beat Saber.

I understand they need to get the rights to it, I'm just surprised they aren't more aggressively doing so. Rock Band has shown it should be doable to negotiate a lot more licenses more quickly than they have.

I understand they like to make a bit of a visual stage experience to each song pack, but not every song pack needs that necessarily, and they should also be able to have multiple teams working on song packs in parallel you'd think, as opposed to one every once in a while, even if they insisted on making new visual themes for each one.

As it is, I'd love to buy more song packs from them, but I'm not that into Queen, or Lizzo, or several others they've done the past couple of years (Electronic Mixtape released in May 2022 was the last one that excited me). And other people have their tastes too. Putting out songs more often insures that people have something new they can support and a reason to get back into it more than once every other year.

The reason I brought up the custom songs, is they could potentially use those for ideas of what players would really like to see in the game, based on custom song usage, as well as possibly once they do get rights to those songs, possibly get permission from the creator to use the beat patterns (or whatever they're called) and save some development time.

I know they hired at least one person from the custom song community before, they could potentially get permission from some others (with some compensation).

I had a discussion with someone who had some real knowledge, and they said Meta can't really make a business with Quest just via Beat Saber. It has some backing, but not a lot of backing, most of their effort on Quest are elsewhere.

I totally get that, I just wish it wasn't so. To me, Quest is the ultimate fitness/active but casual gaming device.

You can get custom songs on Quest, I have probably 99% of my Beat Saber play time on them, search for BMBF on google.

I tried going down that rabbit hole once, and it seemed to break things (although I didn't spend a ton of time on it). I own it on Steam too, so I can play custom songs via that. It's just that's tied to my computer upstairs and I usually prefer to play untethered in my living room.

Most of my custom songs on the Quest I've done have actually been for the game Ragnarock, because it doesn't require sideloading anything, just copying files onto your Quest from your computer. That one is quite fun also.

I also have my computer upstairs and Quest in living room, but found that playing through Virtual Desktop works very well.

It does give extra peace of mind having the games run locally on the device in case of connection issues, and to avoid the occasional need to run upstairs to fix something.

Haven't really tried gaming using Virtual Desktop, just browsing on the computer. Maybe I should give that a try sometime.

> I'm guessing Beat Saber is the only reason the Quest is even sold in Japan and Korea.

Not sure about that[1][2]...

1: JP: https://trends.google.co.jp/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...

2: KR: https://trends.google.co.jp/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&...

>Quest 2 grew the VR market by ~10x

Did it really? So far I don't see any uptick in anything VR related in terms of average daily use.

I read somewhere that most people get VR, try it for a week, then get bored of it.

In terms of hardware sales, yeah. But I agree I’m not sure the users stuck around.

It feels almost like a fad. It was in the right place at the right time by being available when people were in lockdown early in the pandemic. And it sold out, which of course increased demand more.

But three years later, things don’t feel that different from 1/1/2020. It feels like that wave came and went without any long term change in things.

I meant headset sales since I've never been able to find actual usage numbers. Afaict, on usage, everyone is guessing.

I had fun for about an hour using virtual turn tables to mix my music collection, but after awhile it just felt kind of dumb - awkwardly fiddling with knobs in a virtual world with no tactile feedback. It's like it got me halfway towards being productive, but the quality of inputs and feedback are so poor that I quickly reached a ceiling. When it comes to actually getting things done, in my experience VR just gets in the way.

AR on the other hand is something I could easily see becoming useful. One cool use case that immediately comes to mind are instruction manuals. You get a new piece of furniture from Ikea and the AR instructions identify pieces you have laid on the ground and directs you where to put it. Or Legos, right? Real world inputs, and real world results.

Eleven Table Tennis. It's so much fun. The controller is the same weight as a paddle, and it's responsive enough to "feel" right. It's really improved my game and is a surprising amount of exercise.

A lot of kids are spending most of their waking hours in VRChat right now. It's pretty addicting once you have a group of friends in there...

Also (as lots of adult VRChat users will complain about), it's a way to get free babysitting from the internet for your kid.

The internet babysits the minds of children and adults alike. Go to any restaurant and you'll see entire families all glued to their phones.

Yea and everyone is getting in shape from VR too...

These are bogus marketing lines that people puppet back to each other.

I know 20 some kids and not a single one has even the slightest interest in VR.

It is really shocking to me how these kids that can play games all the time have absolutely no interest in VR. It is not uncool or passe, it is just absolutely nothing to them.

It is a niche product that enthusiast oversell because the reality is that most people just don't care.

Not marketing. In reality, tens of thousands of kids are spending ridiculous amounts of time in VR. They will grow up, normalize it, and the next wave will be much much bigger. Sounds like you haven't seen or experienced what I'm talking about, so you have no idea, just your anecdotes.

My kids are on Gorilla Tag and Roblox all day and I complain about it the same way my parents did about the all time I spent in chatrooms and forums back in the day.

It's a slow roll, but I think the seed has been planted.

I've found BigScreen (https://www.bigscreenvr.com/software) to be a fairly compelling killer app case for VR. Besides being able to trick your eyes into thinking they're in a movie theater, the social elements are great. On a weekly cadence I jump into a shared room with 6+ of my friends and we pick a bad movie to watch together as we MST3k it. There's something about positional audio when talking with someone that makes it easier to replicate the experience of hanging out in person versus a video meet.

We've been doing this since the pandemic started and it's the #1 way I stay in touch with a bunch of friends now. It's also ruined real life movie theaters for me since I'm used to being able to talk with friends while watching. We'll actively wait for a movie to hit streaming before "seeing it in the theaters" with each other.

All of this was already possible with the Quest 2, but I'm interested to see how the quest 3 can further make those hangouts feel even closer to the real thing. Dunno if it will be a big enough leap for everyone to jump from the 2 to the 3, but if the visuals comes through sharper, or the sound is better, or the controller is easier to hold for 2 hours - any of those things would be a win.

I haven't got to use VR much, since my apartment is too small for it, but I have played a few rounds of VR racketball.

I have no interest in VR videoconferencing, but shared presence is surprisingly interesting. When you've both got headsets and headphones on, you can't tell the difference from playing in the same room as your friend, even if you're physically hours from one another.

Big screen has the most toxic online community I have ever interacted with. I know there is worse out there but the amount of anti-LGBTQ chat I hear was disturbing for a place that is about watching movies.

Yeah, I wouldn't wade into anything public there - stick to private rooms with your friends. The moment you go into any sort of "I want to meet strangers" in VR setting you're really rolling the dice. I briefly hopped into the "shared lobby" for Big Screen at one point and encountered probably 3 or 4 negative internet stereotypes immediate (14 year old yelling obscenities, someone trying to hump my face, and someone just blasting noise so loud through their mic it was painful). Very much something you would only want to experience with trusted parties.

The killer app is a fun way to do fitness either alone or socially without having to go to the gym and without getting bored since the workouts are dynamic and unreal ie dodging bullets and fighting monsters

If you’re not active, and don’t want to be active; you’re not going to like it beyond watching movies in a virtual movie theater

For me it's sim racing - for other people it's exercise apps, for educational users it's immersing students in ancient Greece.

Sim racing is amazing in VR - I got instantly faster, able to judge distances better, and the immersion is top notch.

What's the killer app of the iPhone 15?

They are releasing something like 50 new games, though they aren't making them exclusive, which follows what consoles seem to do now too.

The killer app for me has been being able to hop on to a VR game with my friends and somewhat feel like we're in the same room. It's too hard to get together frequently, and even setting up a VR 'date' is hard, but it's something.

usb c

No one needs to be convinced to buy a smartphone. They changed the world. People already want them.

VR is not in that position. It needs to prove its utility if it ever wants to escape being a niche.

> So what’s the killer app?

What's the desktops killer app? What's mobile's killer app?

Computing to me is a general purpose system, which grows holistically. This kind of search for certainty, trying to annoint some specific app as the thing that a form factor is all for, is actively harmful to understanding the role of compute & how it fits into augments & enriches so many diverse different things we do.

Creating comfortable computing spaces is never going to be a fast burn. It's taken decades for the desktop to mature. This is a harder challenge, enmeshing with reality rather than being so tightly a self contained system.

I have a lot of questions & uncertainty about how computing rolls out a presence beyond the screen & into the world. It's unknown to me and maybe it flat up fails & never works. But I'd like some respect & acceptance that this is an open ended thing, not going to be so conveniently compact & singular as this ask tries to reduce it to. Searching so hard for certainty is dangerous, rejects the pioneering & open endedness & intergativeness that most rich complex & capable long lasting systems endure through. Let's not be so rash in demanding all our answers ahead of time.

> What’s the desktop’s killer app?

We know that. It’s happened. Wordstar, VisiCalc, Photoshop, PageMaker or Quark Xpress, AutoCAD, Netscape Navigator, AOL. They, and their descendants, moved billions of units.

> What’s the mobile’s killer app?

Chat. Maps. The internet. Uber. Dating. Use as a camera. Email. Shopping. Again, billions of units.

No one has figured out a non-niche application for VR. Normal people don’t care. It’s not even on their radar.

That’s my point. More of the same isn’t going to change that. They either need the app to make it break through or some improvement that allows that app. This is a spec bump. Nice to those already interested, unlikely to attract new people.

Apple is trying something. They’re throwing hardware at it, especially in terms of a very very high resolution screen. They think that will make the difference, even given the price.

We’ll find out. But at least they’re trying something different. Because I don’t see why this would jump into the mainstream.

Hindsight is 20/20.

You have listed a dozen many-billion dollar sectors that have had massive impact on the world, stemming from computing. But it took decades for mass market productization to emerge in most of these areas.

Very very few were so clearly poised to take over. It's easy to point out established computing's wins. But you are demanding certainty & proof, & not granting a nascent form factor any time to find it's footing, to establish it's value.

Quest 3 seems to be .massively expanding the fidelity of the Quest 2's pass-through mode. You talk about Apple trying something, and I think they are, but Meta has been driving similar capabilities, if not harnessing them to such a sensible multi-tasking OS core.

VR suffers from inherent issue that its in a weird space of half immersion - the visuals are there but the motion feedback is not. The closest you can get is a VR motion racing rig, but those are prohibitively expensive. Even without the motion rig, generally 3 screens are often preferred due to better resolution and not having to wear a bulky device.

Besides some fun exercise games and social stuff like VR chat which is fun for a minority of people, once the novelty of 3d wears away, you are left with something that isn't as relaxing as sitting down and playing a regular game.

I think it's interesting to think about it as a hardware evolution question. If you look at a timeline of what it took to get to the modern smartphone, you could (arguably) say:

PalmPilot -> Handspring -> WindowsCE -> Blackberry -> iPhone -> Android -> Modern Smartphone

Each one of those evolutionary steps brought in a larger user base and grew the feature set of the prior generations hardware. The VR/AR/XR market comes with its own set of challenges so imagining where it maps onto that timeline is hard, but I would guess we are still more in the Handspring - WinCE era of these devices.

Wearable display systems have a solid and growing user base but the hardware is still a ways off from something that will have mass adoption. The roadblock is very much in the hardware, not the software IMO.

Pass-through VR porn has gotten really big in the past 6 months, and I'll just say I know that a LOT of people are waiting for the quest-3 entirely for that.

You completely missed everything about mixed reality. That is the killer selling point for Meta Quest 3.

This hardware has the capacity to do almost everything that Apple's device can do for a fraction of the cost (just not with Apple integration).

Walkabout Mini Golf VR

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1408230/Walkabout_Mini_Go...

I wonder if they'll include the photo-realistic avatars, like what was demonstrated between Zuck and Lex Fridman.

https://twitter.com/lexfridman/status/1707453830344868204

Counter-intuitively, I think I'd be able to manage a headset better if it wasn't this box strapped to the front of my face, but rather an evenly balanced hockey helmet with a flip-up mask.

I can do hours wearing a hockey helmet, but these things are uncomfortable after a little while, and I think it's because it's just a more balanced thing that my neck muscles aren't constantly counteracting.

Not to suggest that that's the only thing that makes these a non-start for me, but I feel like that's one of the core issues.

That’s what the PlayStation VR does, and can confirm, it is better.

I always hear good things about PlayStation VR. It seems a real shame that the only company in VR with any experience making wearable devices is using a proprietary platform.

At this point the optics seem… I dunno, pretty well worked out? So, I’d rather have Sennheiser VR than Facebook. Sennheiser knows how to balance a heavy thing on my head for hours.

Seriously, I'd rather have more weight than a face-forward center of gravity. If you're going to cram a laptop in there, put the non-optics behind my head.

There were add-on batteries for the Quest 2 that would attach to the back of the headset, thereby improving the balance which adding battery life. I never tried one.

I’d rather they’d just move the built in battery

I have. The "elite strap" with the crank tightening mechanism was well balanced and surprisingly comfortable even with headphones over top.

So I remember it, anyway - it's been over a year since I bothered with the Quest, so who knows how much I'm glossing over in memory.

I think, functionally, you have a point, but they wouldn’t sell nearly as many if it looked like a helmet. The devices have to be cool to sell, and headsets are uncool enough as it is.

These companies want a mass market product, not a niche product that only tech enthusiasts can appreciate.

I mean, no one's going to use those if they aren't comfortable for long use.

Looking cool is very low on the priority list.

it's wild to me that they don't offer colour options

They now offer color options (https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/)

Getting people to buy them is a superior barrier compared to getting people to keep using them afterwards. People won't appreciate how comfortable something is for long term use if they won't even start using it because it looks uncool compared to alternatives.

Get the Elite Strap with a battery. It makes the headset much more balanced, as well as doubling the play time.

BOBOVR does something similar as a third-party add-on (https://www.bobovr.com/product/m2pro/). It's not quite a full welding mask design but the weight is meant to sit in a similar way. I'm sure they'll have something similar for the Quest 3 before too long.

This fixed the balance thing for me: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09JNR4Y15/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...

Have you heard of the 127 gram headset "Bigscreen Beyond"? Might be what you need to address neck concerns.

https://www.bigscreenvr.com/

Got a 2 on accident, an aunt was dazzled by ideas of exercising and meditating and was wildly underwhelmed by the actual experience, and gifted it to my family.

Kind of fun to have around very occasionally, but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy." Would never pay good money for one.

(and this is from a household where the Steam Deck is absolutely an essential toy.)*

*edit, come to think of it -- said aunt has logged more hours on my Steam Deck even though we don't live together, thanks to the Jackbox series. I feel like there's a lot of good anecdata here :)

The novelty wears off after a bit and then it’s mostly just a less convenient version of a game console (the limited software really hurts any other use)

Good point -- I do wonder if it's inherent or if we really are missing some "much better software?"

A thing that makes me think the latter might be the is how there's no real Google Earth for the Quest, which strikes me as madness?

(also, Aircar and having to jump through hoops to find Tiltbrush/Openbrush?)

The PC Oculus software was much better so there’s definitely more they can do; the Quest software is full of artificial limitations, like having window placement and sizing be unnecessarily limited. They’re also somewhat hostile to sideloading (not blocking it but making it more difficult than it needs to be) which probably hurts niche use cases

Yup, I do the sideloading.

It's kind of interesting how garbage most the sideloaded apps are? I'm not expecting amazing, but, like even your average popular Roblox game has more polish.

Even without VR, I think Google StreetView (or equivalent competitors) are heavily underrated contents. Improving UI like FPS game would make significant difference even in desktop. Maybe it's too costly for operator due to bigger data and bad cache hit rate, and difficult to monetize.

> but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy."

I saw a reviewer mention that VR is like "having your favorite amusement park ride at home": it's awesome, but at the same time you're not going to ride a roller coaster for 3 hours everyday.

VR can be loads of fun, but I still find it exhausting, and very focus demanding. It will, for me, always remain a nice plus, but never as essential as something I can easily pause and put down.

Absolutely.

I LOVE "Pistol Whip," but I'm in my 40s. I literally can only do about 2 or 3 rounds of that in one day :)

For whatever reason Pistol Whip gives me crazy anxiety.

Definitely. A bug and a feature for sure. Superhot lets you slow everything to matrix/bullet time which is super cool, but Pistol Whip is like LETS SEE HOW YOU FARE IN REAL TIME. :)

This resonates for me as well. It's just too exhausting and uncomfortable, and I hate the feeling of isolation from the real world.

I think it may be the case that the general public will find putting on VR goggles and losing their visual connection to the physical world around them to be weird and alienating in a way that fundamentally cannot be overcome by technical improvements.

Maybe VR goggles are OK for small doses and the novelty, but perhaps this is just too jarring and strange to ever become the primary way people interact with games (never mind the much touted non-gaming applications).

For hardware, visual connection to real is what Apple and Meta are solving with their latest products. For software, non-VR software in the room is still lacking but Apple and third parties will solve it. Many VR software are better with remain isolated.

Starting with the Quest Pro, I think this problem has been solved. When I started using it, aside from the lightness, I noticed that I didn’t care about adding in the light shields. I liked being able to have a decent view of both my left and right at the cost of immersion. I’m sure the vision pro will take this a step further

> having your favorite amusement park ride at home

I dunno, I'm still waiting for a good recreation of Haunted Mansion in VR.

I think Half-Life Alyx would qualify

I regularly play competitive VR shooters for hours at a time - against servers populated with people who do the same.

>but I'm still seeing nothing to indicate anything more than "overpriced, non-essential toy."

This seems like a semi common sentiment. To those who used both a Valve Index and a Quest 1 or 2, is this also true for the Index?

So I do have access to Indexes and the HTC ones, and they do seem to have some more stuff, but I'm also curious what other people think. I definitely could see it if they had more things like Google Earth, which is weirdly absent from the Quest.

Notable shift in emphasis to mixed reality. I wish they had HDR support called out for the passthrough though.

The Quest 2 CPU was too weak, and while this one will be better the Apple chips are still way out in front there.

The proportion of people in tech I know with a Quest 2 they never use is amazing. We all want VR to work but fundamentally headsets are a bad idea.

Could you explain about HDR passthrough? I'm thinking "see real life sunsets in glorious HDR color," which is probably not what you mean.

hdr for the added content no?

It's that rooms, especially sunny ones, contain incredible amounts of variation in intensity, and that failing to capture/display that is at least as big a problem as not enough pixels per inch.

It also helps dramatically if the captured HDR surroundings can be fed on to an envmap for use in the 3D rendering phase.

Oh, that makes sense. Real life has a big dynamic range, so if you're trying to augment that, it won't look right unless it also can cover a big dynamic range.

I daily drove my quest 2 using immersed VR for a few months. In the end, the resolution was just not good enough for it to be better than my 3 monitor setup. But I'm looking forward to trying again in a couple of generations.

Big same. I want immersed to work so bad. But the resolution/dpi is garbage compared to even a shitty monitor. It also makes me nauseous but I'd be willing to deal with that if the experience was what I want it to be.

So you were using a Quest 2 for month before you decided the resolution is generations away from beeing good enough? :)

Yes, I knew I would need to live with some annoyances if I wanted to be an early adopter on this. I tried to adapt but in the end it was just too much of an inconvenience. And while my quest 2 is indeed currently collecting dust, I don't think headsets are a bad idea. Just that their current implementations are not good enough for my use case. Regardless of that, I'm optimistic about the future of using an HMD as your main general computing device's display. I'm willing to bet it will be a pretty common setup in 5 years or so.

Many here want/wanted the same thing. It has always puzzled me why. I like to use a piece of paper next to the computer and i also like the look and feel of a nice wooden desk and the sound of a pair of decend speakers. No matter how great the headset, i fail to see it as an improvement except for some very specific usecases.

Honestly, the answer might just be: "Because it's freaking cool!" and I totally understand why that doesn't appeal to you.

The resolution was probably OK, you wanted lower FOV or higher pixels per degree (PPD). There are monitor replacement AR glasses with the same resolution or lower, but acceptable PPD due to their low FOV.

Looking forward to testing the Vision Pro for this usecase. Resolution looks high enough to possibly be The One, and if it replaces my monitors then the price might be worth it.

Immersed are bringing out their own headset next year with 4k per eye for this use case for far less money than the apple vision.

https://www.visor.com/

I'm clueless -- how do these things work? Are they standalone, or do you also need a gaming PC? Do you need internet connection, or is there stuff that works offline? Do you need Facebook account? Are they hackable, e.g., are there custom firmware options?

Standalone, but you can connect to PC if you want to play graphically intensive games. Quest 2 basically, you login with FB account so you need internet connection at first. Pretty "unhackable" afaik, you can install custom mods for games but thats pretty much it in terms of modifications I've seen.

You don't need Facebook account.

You need a Meta account

Which is not a facebook account..

Not yet!

Both standalone as well as connecting to pc works. I believe they work offline but I dont know for sure. Not hackable, what is often possible is using custom client software that handles the vr stuff on the pc.

The Quest works in both standalone and PC connected modes. A gaming PC will give you a different game library and way more rendering power, but PCVR is nearly an abandoned platform these days. Most VR money goes into standalone and PlayStation VR.

You will need internet to download games, but it can operate in offline mode as well if the game supports it.

You do need an account, but it can be a Meta account not connected to your Facebook if your choose.

They are not hackable in any way and there are no custom firmwares. In fact, the software side of these devices is incredibly complex (tracking, lens correction, very low latency rendering and control pipelines) and replicating the work that FB has done would be an effort for a large team of VR engineers. If you dig into some of the details of how they work you will realize they are a technological marvel to rival the iPhone.

> They are not hackable in any way and there are no custom firmwares.

There is a homebrew scene however, on sidequest.

> PCVR is nearly an abandoned platform these days.

Maybe, but Halflife Alyx is almost worth the cost of entry on its own

Quest 2 works standalone with games made for it, or connected to PC and can use the Oculus store library as well as the Steam VR library. This makes it the most flexible VR headset on the market atm.

Don't know about Quest 3, but probably the same.

Along with the other comments, one extra thing to note is that the three-point tracking (head + 2 hands) is entirely standalone even when connected to a PC (platforms like Steam VR will translate it across), so you don't need any other hardware than that. Apps and games then generally either guesstimate the rest of your body positioning (using inverse kinematics) or just leave it out entirely by making you walk on your hands (like Gorilla Tag does - this actually works way better than it sounds).

There are some additional standalone body trackers, like SlimeVR, Sony mocopi, or HaritoraX, where you strap the hardware widgets on and they communicate inertial measurements with each other and your device without needing any base stations. But, since there's no OS-level support for them on Quest, support is app-by-app and usually requires a second device as a go-between (like a phone running the mocopi app).

PCVR makes it easy to use a ton of trackers and they're much more precise, but they require base stations (IR cameras on mounts you set up around your play space) since each one is basically a little IR transmitter with its position computed by the PC. If you see any "full body trolling" videos on Youtube it's generally people using these, since you can do strange things with them (handstands, pogo stick bouncing, multiple people sharing the same physical space, other Youtube creator nonsense) without the tracking getting confused or desynced.

If you haven't tried it yet, Supernatural app is great. I lost around 30 pounds while I was using it at home. Now gained some weight back, but hopefully in winter time will get back to the app. And today I got announcement it's only $10/month vs $20 starting October 14.

I boxed every day for a month on Quest 2, I would have paid $200+ if I could get full colour pass through at the tap of a button. idk if I'd pay $500 but that would have made working out daily wayy easier.

I used a sweat mask that also blocked light, so no down peaking, youd have to take it off just to take a drink of water or sit down for a couple minutes. That's very annoying.

Early review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpUIndlsV78

Seems positive overall. Pancake lenses like in Quest Pro. Chipset fast enough to get dynamic shadows in games.

I haven’t kept up with VR/AR at all but is anyone offering the ability to attend concerts and shows via VR?

I’m thinking like some kind of high quality 360 audio/video capture rig sat in a good seat at gigs across the country and I can buy a cheap ticket to attend via VR. It’s obviously never going to beat attending in real life but my use case is more about getting to attend gigs I can’t get to in real life.

They explicitly called out sporting events during the press release, so I would expect that concerts would be easy. They already have gear for court / ring side seats.

I'm not VR pro, but the resolution sertainly feels lacking.

There were articles where people were writing how they are programming for many hours in their quest2. I cannot understand how this is possible with this bad text

Its okay if you have not used a high res screen recently. Its like using a shitty college classroom projector to program. I have a cheap 4k monitor so it kind of ruined vr for me for the moment. I will not get an 8k monitor until I have the screen in a headset first.

And this is weird to me. As a software engineer, who works with text all the time, I was buying IPS panels with as high resolution as I was able to justify for my entire career.

I don't see myself coding it quest, it is just too blurry.

Although this could be me and my personal preferences, as I also cannot program on something like macbook air 13", and there are people who can easily do it.

I used dual 2k 27" more than 10 years ago, now the main screen that I look at is 4k 32" and there are 2 2k 27" side by side. If linux didn't suck with mixed dpis and there were 240Hz IPS 27" (I use one of them for gaming), I'd already start considering 4k 27".

---

Having said all of that, I certainly believe that there will be time when the FOV and resolution will be enough to replace monitors.

Like now, I have 3 monitors because I don't want to dance with workspaces etc. I still can focus only on one at one time.

Intelligent zoom and activation of windows/workspaces, improved to one that Apple shown in visionpro presentation, will be killer feature, as I objectively will be able to have multiple 4k screens without any table space used by monitors.

2nd'd

But also I can't handle the poor resolution of most ultra-wide monitors either.

Going off the guesstimated PPDs and so on, I feel like the Apple Vision Pro is really going to be about the bare minimum to actually feel comfortable working on code stuff in VR/AR.

I don't think at this price point we can get really resolution for tasks like programming for at least few more years. Those screens are just still very expensive (and power hungry).

As someone who loves VR, I'm not sure at $500 who this headset is for.

If you want something cheap but decent, a Quest 2 is a better deal at $300. It'll give you a cordless, hassle-free, console-like experience as a standalone device if that's what you want, or, if you instead want to play graphically intense VR games, you can connect it to a gaming PC and use SteamVR (AirLink, Virtual Desktop, or a USB-C cable.)

If you want something high end with a really solid game library so far, the PSVR2 is much better than this at $550 (though requires a PS5.)

The Quest 2 had a promising start with several great games coming to it, but then Meta seemingly stopped funding new games and VR ports, and unfortunately SteamVR hasn't had a ton release recently either.

Sony, on the other hand, had an incredible starting library for the PSVR2 and plenty more AA and AAA games are releasing soon. Discoverability is also much better on PSVR2 — my friend with the headset has shown me many great games that actually are on the Quest and SteamVR, but I had never seen them before as there are so many more games on Steam and the Quest store (unfortunately most of which aren't good.) Not sure if Sony curates their store better or if it's just that not much shovelware has been made on it yet. In either case, great games exist on all 3 of those platforms, but they're easiest to discover on PSVR2.

As others have mentioned, Meta's resources would be better spent bringing games to their existing headset versus creating new ones. I do think that having a more powerful headset would allow more impressive experiences (as is the case with PSVR2), but people aren't going to keep buying their devices if only a handful of impressive games release on them.

Nintendo regularly releases underpowered hardware compared to the competition, but they make such great first-party games that they end up selling incredibly well despite their lackluster hardware. The Quest 2 sold very well, and I imagine that games like Resident Evil 4 VR probably convinced many people to buy it (I know at least one person who got it for that game.) The Quest Pro did not sell well, so I'm not sure why they think better hardware but with the same library will convince people to buy new headsets.

EDIT: I guess I should have done a bit more searching, as does seem like there are some potentially popular games coming out for the Quest still, such as Assassin's Creed Nexus VR and Attack on Titan VR: Unbreakable. Strange I haven't gotten any ads for it on YouTube, I saw tons of ads for Resident Evil 4 VR for the Quest 2 (as well as some of the Star Wars VR games.)

Quest 2 was underrated one of the best deals in tech in recent history. Easily worth the $300.

I got way more enjoyment out of it than I ever expected as a casual gamer. Replaying Resident Evil 4 + the various workout apps like boxing made it worth the price. But I got much more.

The beta app store offers a TON of free games still in dev too. https://sidequestvr.com/apps/applab/0/rating

I completely agree, I just got a used quest2 for $200 and this doesn't see any compelling reason to shell out the extra $300 yet.

Maybe someone's going to come up with a must have AR experience but as someone who mostly uses their quest for sims and gaming, I feel like my money would be better spent on upgrading my computer

very interesting to see that they did not talk much about specs besides "oh we got the latest chip" and "our screen and lens are better".

standalone vr has its own place, but for enthusiasts, and even some of their own demos, are using the headset with a pc. i would like to know more about what they did to improve that experience.

a faster usb-c throughput is a must, so would be improvements with wifi performance. since none of them were mentioned, i am afraid we will be stuck at the same limitations with quest 2 despite working with "better" hardware.

rumour mill is talking about a valve contender soon tm (or at least a new headset), which if close in price, might be better suited for many who are ok with cables.

This seems like on paper it is quite close to the Apple Vision Pro. The performance per watt of the chips is probably not far off and both devices deal with the same basic design constraints of needing to fit comfortably on your head. The main difference seems to be the micro OLED and eye tracking on the Vision Pro vs. the Quest’s inclusion of controllers.

I’ll be curious how these two devices stack up to each other and exactly how different the user experiences end up being. The MR experience seems like it may be close. The VR gaming experience seems more emphasized on the Quest, but hand tracking has come a long way so I wouldn’t rule out the Vision Pro here either.

Overall I’m doubtful either device will hit mass market appeal.

I'm sorry, but what about the Quest 3 on paper seems to you to be close to the Vision Pro?

Device with focus on mixed reality and productivity sporting the latest in mobile chips and hand tracking. It also does VR but MR is the new feature being brought to the table.

Vision pro is all about mixed reality. So is the quest 3. As far as I can tell most of the difference between 2 and 3 is the vastly improved mixed reality. Basically this device is positioning itself to be the consumer version of the vision pro.

>The main difference seems to be the micro OLED and eye tracking on the Vision Pro vs. the Quest’s inclusion of controllers.

Both of which are complete dealbreakers.

AR/VR/Spatial is defined completely by immersion and lack-of-nausea, where less resolution and the inclusion of controllers demolish.

You're right, both probably won't reach mass-market appeal, but the two certainly aren't comparable in any metric other than reach.

Interesting. You see the inclusion of controllers as a bad thing?

Could be? If Quest 3 can deliver a nausea free experience then it may hit the same use cases as the Vision Pro. The controllers are also extremely precise, so Apple would need to pull off a nice trick to get hand tracking to that same level.

>AR/VR/Spatial is defined completely by immersion and lack-of-nausea, where less resolution and the inclusion of controllers demolish.

Not for me. I had loads of fun gaming on the Quest 2 in the pandemic lockdowns, and the controllers really help with gaming by providing accurate controls for weapons' triggers and haptics to feel weapons firing and when the tension in the bow before you fire arrow. Good luck feeling all that via waving your empty hands in the air.

I feel like HN simply loves to hate certain things without understanding them or using them, like the Quest while never actually using it for games and expecting it to be an early Apple Vision PRO. It's not, it was designed to be a games console, and for that it works quite well.

It also feels like there's a Paretto principle of VR experiences that people seem eager to avoid; the last '20%' of experiences offered by PCVR or Vision Pro might not be worth it. Even as a tech nerd, I don't really find myself pining for an upgrade to my original Quest. It offers the '80%' of the experience I'd actually want a headset for. I can watch 3D movies in bed, play immersive games or browse the internet surrounded by tabs. Adding iMessage to that equation will probably not be worth $3,000 for the average consumer.

Given the direction digital markets are headed (and the open precedent of VR), I think Meta is right to bet on that '80%'. It's much easier to pitch a console like the Quest than an overly-ambitious lockdown-helmet that costs as much as 2 used cars. Until Apple announces a better Vision lineup, it's going to be a bloodbath in terms of unit shipments.

they don't seem super similar to me:

Snapdragon vs M2 Vision Pro's resolution seems about 80% higher than the quest 3. To me, this is the most important factor to me in making augmented reality work.

It's also not premium looking / really ugly compared to the vision Pro, looks like a really nerdy toy that isolates you from reality even more than usual tech, which is something us tech people maybe don't value enough, but which Apple knows is very important for mass appeal (see, phones, computers), & is an obstacle for adoption.

There's a reason why Apple put a screen with eyes and the associated cameras inside, it's to make it look less stupid. That's really important for mass adoption.

Performance per watt is not far off? The processor is half the speed of the M2.

These devices need to fit in a very specific power and heat envelope. Is the performance per watt 2x better at the TDP they both run at? We’ll need benchmarks to find out.

> quite close

The difference in PPD is pretty significant when it comes to both actual mixed reality use around other people (assuming people can get over the dork factor in general) and anything at all related to virtual screens (whether productivity or just 'personal theater' usage).

You can buy between 7 and a dozen quest 3s for the price of one vision pro. I don’t understand why people are even attempting to compare the two.

> Gaming: 2.4 hours of usage on average

> Social: 2.2 hours of usage on average

> Productivity: 1.5 hours minutes [sic] of usage on average

How is this accurate? What kind of "Productivity" tasks are people doing inside a Quest if it uses more power/battery than gaming? Also, "Social" drawing more power than "Gaming" too? Something seems weird.

Going by how my Macbook's battery life evaporates with 10 Chrome tabs + Slack + Zoom, I believe it. Gaming is definitely less load than multiple windows of modern work apps.

Compared to playing a game which would definitely use both GPU and CPU, instead of mostly just CPU?

Almost every such app uses GPU as well.

True, but nowhere near the level that a game would. As an example, it'll be hard to find a productivity/office application that is bottlenecked by the GPU, while for games, it's relatively easy to find.

The modern web is pretty taxing on a GPU... Plenty of webpages have 100+ layers to composite together...

Sure, but those only get rendered when stuff is actually changing on the screen, otherwise it stands still, compared to games which would (usually at least) continue to render N FPS no matter if the screen is identical or not compared to previous frame.

If your MacBook battery is recent and lasting for less than 8 hours, you’re doing something very unusual.

Microsoft Teams can absolutely use more battery than many games.

Ditto for Instagram.

Isn't that "social" though?

It’s certainly not productivity.

I wonder if that's AR, and the cameras/processing involved are what use more power.

To be fair, I could only game for 15 min before getting dizzy anyways

There are also apps that basically render your desktop screen in VR.

I'm pretty sure productivity refers mixed reality stuff such as projecting virtual screens and objects in the environment around you.[1] That requires more computation than rendering a fully virtual scene.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imOp7QrBs0c

I'll buy this simply to have a better experience playing Onward VR. I'd buy it if that was the only app/game available. There's other stuff to mess with from time to time but Onward keeps the quest 2 in mostly daily use.

I wrote this blog post "Meta and the Metaverse: a mostly useless big hit" about 2 years ago [0]

I don't know if you agree, but it still mostly applies today. What's the killer app? Why do we need this?

[0]: https://simon.medium.com/meta-and-the-metaverse-a-mostly-use...

The best VR experience I've ever had was with the original PSVR, sat on a chair surrounded by cables with my wife and son playing with me. I bought Oculus Rift and then the Quest 2 and they were both used for 40 mins max and collect dust.

For me, it is an incredibly isolating experience unless, like PS did, other people are playing with you in the room and you are taking turns.

I wonder what the future holds for these devices now that Meta has drastically decreased their Metaverse spending.

Any word on what "tactile feedback" or "experiences you can feel" for the controllers means here? Did they just add vibration and punch it up with marketing bullshit, or is something fancier being described?

The quest controllers have always had some vibration, which is key to many experiences (and why I'm not taking Apple's offering seriously). Maybe they upped what the controllers can express?

That is usually marketing speak for multiple linear oscillating motors that are accurate enough to accept WAV files as input.

I tried a 2 and it was a sterile, and walled-garden experience. Getting Steam to work on it felt like all workarounds. Lots of accuracy and user experience issues that made me return it. I expect no different with this.

I wonder who in audience was cheering for Horizon Worlds getting more features. There are hardly any useful experiences in there. Mostly it's obscenity screaming people, alarmingly often sounding very young.

Terrible marketing website. I tried and failed to find improvements over Quest 2.

> Terrible marketing website. I tried and failed to find improvements over Quest 2.

"2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough. Delivers full-color, high-fidelity views of your surroundings while you see virtual objects appear in your physical space. Accurate depth projection and room mapping gives you freedom to move throughout your space and interact with virtual characters or objects in the room around you."

"2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2 for next-level clarity and lifelike graphics. 4K+ Infinite Display with 25PPD and 1218 PPI brings the best resolution across the entire Quest line of devices."

Apple always puts a (questionable) bar graph on their product release pages. Meta though...

"Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, delivering double the GPU processing power for faster load times and more seamless gameplay compared to Meta Quest 2"

"2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough."

"Integrated stereo speakers with 3D spatial audio places you in your space with 40% louder audio range, bass range and optimal L/R matching capabilities. "

"8GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2"

"Pancake optics create a 40% slimmer optic profile* for more comfortable wear. As compared to Quest 2 excluding the facial interface. "

"2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2"

"Pancake lens provides a slimmer optic profile without compromising the depth of your visual immersion. Increased sharpness by 25% in center FOV (~70% sharper in periphery), with significantly less stray or scattered light artifacts. "

See Tech Specs. It's full of comparisons.

- Display Resolution: 2064x2208 pixels per eye enhances resolution by nearly 30% compared to Meta Quest 2 for next-level clarity and lifelike graphics. 4K+ Infinite Display with 25PPD and 1218 PPI brings the best resolution across the entire Quest line of devices.

- Power: Advanced hardware stack and the first headset with the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, delivering double the GPU processing power for faster load times and more seamless gameplay compared to Meta Quest 2. This brings enough power to support heavy applications like fast-action gaming, seamless full-color, high-resolution passthrough, and so much more.

- Mixed Reality: 2 RGB cameras with 18 PPD, for 10X the resolution of Quest 2 and 2X the resolution of Quest Pro in passthrough. Delivers full-color, high-fidelity views of your surroundings while you see virtual objects appear in your physical space. Accurate depth projection and room mapping gives you freedom to move throughout your space and interact with virtual characters or objects in the room around you.

- Audio: Integrated stereo speakers with 3D spatial audio places you in your space with 40% louder audio range, bass range and optimal L/R matching capabilities.

- DRAM: 8GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2, giving you more support to play your favorite apps with optimal performance.

- Headset Weight: 515 grams. Pancake optics create a 40% slimmer optic profile* for more comfortable wear.

- Optics: Pancake lens provides a slimmer optic profile* without compromising the depth of your visual immersion. Increased sharpness by 25% in center FOV (~70% sharper in periphery), with significantly less stray or scattered light artifacts.

Is is not under tech specs, as another comment says. But there is a menu option to compare devices.

  2 -> 3
  $300 -> $500
  Snapdragon XR2 Gen1 -> Gen 2
  6GB -> 8GB
  773 PPI -> 1218 PPI
  FOV 90/90 -> 110H / 96V
  Improved haptics
  Passthrough B&W -> Color
  Battery 3640 mAH -> 5060 mAH (2 hour -> 2.2 hour)

I have a Quest2 that only used for about 1 hour, is there any resale value or trade-in somewhere? it's collecting dust these two years, supposed to be a Christmas gift, did not work out at all.

eBay filtering by sold listings?

Looks like they're currently mostly fetching $150-200 used:

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=quest+2&_sacat=0&LH_Ite...

I'm actually surprised -- I thought it would plummet once the 3 came out. Maybe it still will over the next few weeks if people with 2's upgrade to 3's and the marketplace gets flooded with 2's.

Mine was sold within a few hours of listing it on FB Marketplace.

Thanks! will try it there.

Do they have a trade-in program like Apple does for the iPhone/MacBook?

New $1k phone, but trade your old one in for $500... not as bad.

I doubt there's a market for a bunch of used/refurbished Meta Quest 2s though...

So I might get $20 for my dusty, abandoned Rift S then?

I'm a bit out of the game on VR these days but I noticed there is no eye tracking which probably means no foveated rendering? I thought that was the new hottness these days.

The Quest Pro had eye tracking, but it was likely excluded for cost reason here. The performance increase from Foveated Rendering was minor on the Quest Pro because of the overhead needed to do high accuracy, low latency eye tracking.

Eye tracking will probably make it to the Quest 4, especially if Apple proves it out as a control input. Big If there IMHO.

can't even see the site, I keep fighting with cookie pop ups

No one is making good software for these things. And Meta’s desire to have their own walled garden is reducing the strength of their products.

looks great but I barely even use my quest 2. I think for the money a nintendo switch is a better deal. and I say this as someone who is eagerly awaiting for the apple vision.

The biggest use case for me is having a virtual multi monitor setup. there's apps to do that in quest 2 but they just weren't' quite good enough to daily drive.

No killer app but the best tech if 2023. will buy

What's the Linux story around Quest these days? I want to buy a VR headset but Linux compat is a must. Any recommendations?

It’s a standalone device, so I’m not sure I understand the question.

You can't exactly run Linux on the hardware itself, but you can easily get it working with OpenXR-compatible software stacks. Getting your Linux box up to snuff is a bit harder though.

It's still severely locked down Android. You can enable some hand-holding kid gloves "developer mode" features that go ever so slightly above what a normal user would be able to do but be prepared to sacrifice your firstborn just to get developer access (requires having a phone paired to the device with your personal Facebook account so no chance of sharing developer mode features with anyone else).

Trying to do file management on the Quest platform is a nightmware. With a whole lot of work you can flash some Android apps that can do things like SFTP but it's impossible to keep the headset "awake" long enough to complete large file transfers. Not only that but it'll auto kill such apps that have been open for a while without activity.

You have no mechanism to schedule tasks or execute arbitrary scripts. There's no command line access to speak of. Closest you can get is locked down adb.

Apps can access other apps storage areas if they've designated that area as shareable (e.g. not part of the app itself). So that means if you say, mod Beat Saber (which is very complicated/difficult compared to PC) the downloaded maps can be accessed by a normal Android file sharing application. But like I said, the headset will turn itself off and occasionally just plain kill any app that's running without activity (maybe due to lots of network activity? Dunno).

Trying to keep the files on your headset in sync with anything anywhere is always a manual process. There's no way to script or automate anything. You also can't install URL handlers that would say, open another app to handle a particular filetype (that's locked down). I haven't tried it but I also haven't seen a mechanism to install your own certificates.

There's also no way to set the clock (LOL). Once you pick your timezone when you first power on the device (and mandatory pair it with your personal phone/Facebook account) you must use that timezone forever. This means that if something goes wrong with the date (as did happen with my headset) the device will no longer accept any SSL certificates which means no updates and basically everything stops working on the headset. The only fix for this is a factory reset.

Meta support is also total garbage. If you have an issue and it's not part of their script of answers or something they've encountered a million times it's not getting fixed. FACTORY RESET is what they say over and over again because Meta wants the headset to be perceived as an appliance and most certainly not as a general-purpose computing platform.

That last fact is what I think holds back the entire platform as a whole. If they used a regular Linux distribution and gave developers the power to use it like a normal Linux distribution it would accelerate innovation and vastly increase the usability, availability of apps, and overall improve the user experience.

Thank you, I wish I could upvote this 10 times to show my gratitude for your answer and the time it took you. I learned more about the Quest and Meta's philosophy/approach in general reading your answer than anything else, and I'm in your debt good sir

You can use a Quest with Linux if you use alvr for streaming. I've never been able to get VR working on Linux no matter the headset though personally.

"Accept all cookies" just sends me back to the cookie acceptance prompt. Can't view the page content.

Chrome on Android.

This was the announcement I was really waiting for, but I actually got blown away more by the AI stuff

Hint: Immersive Generative AI is the killer app.

Radiance fields, Gaussian Splatter, Photogrammetry, and other computational photographic techniques are where this is headed. It's not that much overhead to render a stereoscopic view from the same dataset. That camera array on the back of your phone is more than capable of hand tracking.

Being able to capture "spatial video" is the hook Apple is using to sell their top-of-the-line iPhone 15 Pro Max handsets. You can already achieve this to a degree[^1] with tools like Lifecast[^2], but when Apple throws their billion-dollar marketing chops behind it, you get it integrated into a dominant ecosystem.

[^1]: https://holovolo.tv/

[^2]: https://www.lifecastvr.com/index.html

I am just waiting until Valve releases an open, PC based competitor to the meta quest.

when has Valve released anything 'open'? (at least with regards to end-user products..)

The steam deck is a linux pc with an unlocked bootloader.

All of their work on Proton is open source: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton

I mean, you can install Windows or whatever distro you'd like on the Deck. Not sure what more you could want, honestly.

The Steam Deck is extremely open in both software and hardware

random question what is the radioactivity into those vr headsets meta quest 3 and vision pro and what are the impacts of having wifi right on your brain?

Wish there was a trade in option from the Quest 2.

I'm glad I sold all my Quest 2 headsets (family) earlier this year. These things go obsolete faster than phones.

A.k.a. the budget version of Apple Vision Pro. Just $649.99 plus all your personal data! Strap it on your eyeballs and feed the machine, the algorithm hungers!

The Vision Pro wishes it could sell as many units as the Quest did. If the lifetime units sold exceeds the Quest 2's first quarter of shipments, it will be a small miracle.

> Just $649.99 plus all your personal data! Strap it on your eyeballs and feed the machine, the algorithm hungers!

My favorite part of Hacker News is how people rattle their adtech surveillance pans, but always hide away whenever someone mentions the NSA or PRISM. You guys remember last week when Canada used FIVE-EYES to grab telecom data off an unsuspecting, international citizen using commodity hardware?

Coming soon: the same duopoly of shit, but now on VR. As they say, don't throw stones from glass headsets.

how does the pro version compare to the 2 and 3? would you get pro over this one?

sorry quest 2, you wont be supported for long now -

The website isn't GDPR compliant, can't read it without accessing the cookies.

Is it just me getting a loop on the cookie banner? No matter what I press, it refreshes and shows me the banner again. (Firefox Android)

Broken on Firefox for me

> Broken on Firefox for me

Folks, it's Meta, be easy on them. It's not like they have experience building websites...

Yep, decline cookies, then again, then again. Third time is the charm somehow.

keep doing it and clicking on buttons, eventually I got in but it was maybe 6th attempt (firefox + ublock origin)

Just enable the annoyance lists in uBlock Origin and stop rejecting/accepting cookies like a modern person :)

I've had UBO for years without enabled annoyance lists (great naming BTW) and WOW, just WOW, after enabling them the internet seems like a completely different place. Thx!

Personally I discovered them a week ago myself, so I'm happy to spread this new experience to others :)

Thank you! For Firefox mobile users: 3 dot menu > add-ons > uBlock Origin > Open the Dashboard > Filter Lists > Annoyances

There's two cookie notices options in there.

Happened to me on Chrome too.

I had this, until I deactivated the "I don't care about cookies" extension.

https://thejenkinscomic.wordpress.com/2021/01/26/doesnt-use-...

if you decline cookies the page doesn't load. meta can get <insert four letter explicative here>ed.

Hey Mark,

Send an email to NVIDIA's GeForce Now bizdev guy.

Develop a cheap-o streaming device and put all the juice in the display.

Congratulations, I just made you billions of dollars. Donate my cut to PETA.

streaming + vr seems like a recipe for disaster. even if you don't mind a few extra frames of latency when playing games on your TV, you absolutely will when head tracking is involved.

streaming + mouse & keyboard for shooters still feels like shit, even when I tried it on google stadia over google fiber.

honestly i kind of hope this game streaming fad never really takes off, because so far it just seems to make games worse. i'm convinced publishers want it as a means to further erode user ownership of the software they buy. "oh, sorry, the single player game you bought four years ago on a streaming platform is no longer available due to rights issues. would you like to buy the sequel for $70?"

Playing ultra-settings Starfield on an old retina MacBook air is mindblowing. GeForce Now, imo, is quietly the killer app of 2023.

> game streaming fad never really takes off

I am in the opposite camp. I want game developers to be freed from local hardware constraints, and indy developers to have access to the same graphical fidelities as AAA. Real, meaningful innovation in gaming is a possibility.

> and indy developers to have access to the same graphical fidelities as AAA

The bottleneck here isn't performance, it's the cost of producing high quality assets on a AAA scale. Streaming won't solve this.

As for "local hardware constraints", I've yet to see any streaming games that were not possible on local hardware. Personally, I'd rather upgrade my GPU or video game console every 5 years than lose all the very tangible benefits that come with running games on my own hardware (ownership, mods, preservation, etc.)

I will say that I think services like GeForce Now are the best use case for the technology. Since it is essentially a rentable high end gaming PC in the cloud, the user brings their own games. If GeForce now shuts down, you still have the option of downloading all the games you bought for on it to a PC. Nvidia is smart to position this as an additive experience, rather than a replacement like Stadia was.

While I like your idea, that needs to come with a cleaning service included :p

For a mainstream VR headset, you really need low latency. It's almost as bad as hard real-time machines because your users will get a mean headache and literally start to vomit if the latency between moving their head and the picture updating becomes too high. Rumor has it that reducing the screen latency by re-projecting a previously rendered frame was one of the big contributions that John Carmack developed to make Oculus feasible at all. So that means you now either need to stream ultra high resolution panoramas, which is too much data for even current 8k H265 codes to handle, or you need a streaming service with such an extremely low latency that just due to speed of light it basically has to be inside your city. Or well, you just accept that people will feel sick from the latency and reduce your target market to the 1% that can tolerate a 10ms delay on their vision.

They have discussed working on it for years. The problem is that very few people are close enough to a data center with rock solid internet and Wi-Fi to be able to hit the very narrow latency constraints.

I played HL Alyx for a few hours by streaming from PlutoSphere. It worked poorly due to frame drops and lag spikes.

After I lost all of my purchases after deleting my Facebook account (not that I used my old Quest anyways), I decided I would never purchase another Meta product (even though that's probably the LEAST abusive thing they do).

The only information I need: horizontal angle:110, vertical angle 90. Garbage.

I don’t know how anyone finds these experience immersive.

What are the stats on the predecessor (which is Quest 2, right?)

https://www.google.com/search?q=quest+2+horizontal+angle

https://www.meta.com/quest/compare/

Quest 2 was 90h/90v, Quest 3 is 110h/96v

I can have an immersive experience using a monochrome book ~10 degrees FoV.

It's only immersive if the content is good but I get what you mean.

In 2014 when I was using my Note 4 + Gear VR, I really thought in 5 years (2019) things would be incredibly advanced in VR.

Here we are in 2023 and obviously these headsets are way better than we had before, but nothing truly mind-blowing.

Foveated rendering + high immersive POV + high resolution.

I don't need the mobile processor to be twice as powerful, the difference in rendering is still crap compared to a full PC.

I understand there are some actual limits of physics in play here when it comes to FOV but I'm excited for it becomes a solved problem.

We probably aren't there because of consumer demand. None of the headsets have really gotten enough sales to justify the research in those things to make them better. If they were selling like smartphones we would have a much different set of features.

The screens are much closer to the eyes. Perceived angles may be higher than actual.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_virtual_reality_headse...

If you sort by release date, the Vive XR (2023) beats it on FOV+Rez+Hz, and weights 3x as less.

If you sort by FOV, the HTC Vive (2016) easily wins on FOV+Rez+Hz

What's "it"? Quest 3 isn't on that list.

But comparing the Vive XR to the specs in the announcement, the Quest 3 has a higher resolution, same FOV, same refresh rate (experimental sorry for higher refresh rate) at half the price but double the weight.

That's not true. The original HTC Vive has the same refresh rate (90Hz) and field of view (110° horizontal), but the Quest 3's resolution is 2064x2208 per eye while the Vive's is 1080x1200. The Vive XR Elite has the same refresh rate (90Hz) and field of view (110° horizontal), but a lower resolution of 1920x1920 per eye. It also costs twice as much as the Quest 3.

The Vive XR Elite's lower claimed weight of 270 grams is without the battery. With battery it weighs 625g, which is heavier than the Quest 1 (571g), Quest 2 (503g), or Quest 3 (515g).

Indeed. HL Alyx through the Quest 2 is the only thing that kinda got me immersed because the environment looks so good. But it takes a while because it's really like looking through a small window.

I don't need/want all the mixed reality and metaverse BS. I just want a good FoV and resolution. They really invest in the wrong areas, imo.

Still no varifocal, foveated rendering, or significant FOV bump. Yawn.

Wouldn’t touch this shit with a 10 ft pole.

Don’t need FB/Meta harvesting my VR data.

Will this have what it takes to compete the Apple thing whose name I forgot?

As someone who hasn't done anything with these VR headsets it appears Meta & Apple are emphasizing AR/productively because gaming with these things are terrible.

My experience with flight sim, boxing, golfing, and building games feels a lot better with any sort of VR headset. There is also a weird thing where building stuff in VR taps into some primordial primate urge to build much moreso than other gaming media. I've built some structural stuff in real life and the sense of satisfaction of building in VR is nearly identical, which is an absolute trip.

> DRAM > 8 GB. 33% memory compared with Meta Quest 2, giving you more support to play > your favourite apps with optimal performance.

Umm... So they are bragging about how they put in less DRAM?

Probably the biggest disappointment with the Quest 3, but the improved FOV does make up for it.

Quest 2 had 6

What's even the point, now that Echo VR is gone? :(

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/31/23580356/meta-shut-down-e...

I really REALLY wish this thing could be jailbroken. The only thing holding me back from buying one is that I'm not paying $500 + our lovely 27% VAT to strap a surveillance device to my face.

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