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Comment by baby | Hacker News Reader

So it looks like it's basically the same as the Quest 3 except for the screen resolution and the use of different lenses (instead of the pancake lenses). Everything else seems similar or even better (and there's a new button to transition from AR to VR akin to the one on the Apple Vision Pro).

At half the price, the Q3S seems to be a nobrainer no?

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1832 x 1920 is the same resolution from the Quest 2, and fresnel lenses may come from that as well.

That effectively means it's Quest 2 optics with a Quest 3 GPU and color passthrough.

The premium Quest 3's lenses and displays are no doubt better, but for the entry level hardware this is still a good upgrade.

The better GPU will mean it doesn't need to lean as hard on "foveated rendering" where the center of the screen is at high resolution and everywhere else is blurry and upscaled with unreadable text. I say "foveated" in quotes because it doesn't know where your eyes are looking, only how your head is oriented, so if you want to see something in detail you need to point your face at it.

The downgrade in lens type is a huge difference in user experience. Pancake lens is strictly superior than fresnel in almost all aspects, unless you want OLED. In the case of 3S you don't get OLED anyways, so it's a pretty big downgrade.

interesting... I was really looking for a nice upgrade this year, but instead I got a cheaper headset. This is making things difficult. I might just get the Q3S while I wait for a Q4.

Lower resolution, lower FOV and Fresnel lens...

Not really nobrainer if you want the best experience. And things like these could make or break the VR immmersion.

I don't use my Quest 2 because it's so annoying trying to keep the screen in focus with the fresnel lenses.

And they are still featuring beat saber as their killer app.

Honestly as someone with over a thousand hours in VR, I still haven't found anything better than Beat Saber. Rez is fantastic but not something you replay over time. Pistol Whip and HL Alyx are both good but Best Saber is sublime.

Have you tried Contractors in multiplayer?

Honestly I don't really play multiplayer FPSes much these days.

My problem with Beat Saber is the music.

There are some good maps to some good songs… and a LOT of bad maps to really bad songs.

I end up mostly playing curated playlists of custom songs -- BeastSaber's "map of the week" tends to have good experts and expert+s.

Are you talking the PC version? Or the on-device meta OS version?

Because I haven’t seen a song of the week anywhere.

I mean https://bsaber.com/maps-of-the-week/1 -- a fan-curated list of custom songs.

I definitely use the PC version because of the ease of modding.

So I should be more clear, my problem with it is that the official app kind of sucks.

Blade and sorcery was the killer app for me. Beat Saber didn’t make sense until I found the websites which let me use AI to generate my own levels…

I'll never buy another VR headset without pancake lenses.

As someone unfamiliar with the VR headset space, what's the benefit?

Upside: Less distortion, more generous positioning sweet spot, much thinner and lighter.

Downside: Expensive, requires the display to run brighter for the same perceived brightness.

> Pancake lens allow you to make smaller headsets and typically result in better image quality. The downside is they lose a lot of light so you need very bright screens.

Source and detailed explanation with pictures: https://old.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/14lu4wz/whats_...

Another downside is the internal reflections that can make bright spots in otherwise dark scenes.

Still better than old style lenses, but it's not an unmitigated good.

same

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