While reviewing the Meta Quest 3, I aggressively dropped various components of the virtual reality headset. Not once, but twice.
First, I attempted to relocate the official wireless charging stand, with headset and Touch Plus controllers in tow (huge mistake). While changing locations, the headset slid out of its smooth cradle and slammed onto my desk—hard—scratching the front plastic panel in the process. I cursed, loudly. The scratch remained. But so did I. So did I.
The second drop occurred when I, not having learned from the first blunder, attempted to move the charging stand with headset and controllers in tow (yet again). This time, a controller energetically jumped out of its holder like it was training for the Olympics and proceeded to bounce down a flight of stairs in the most comical Looney Toons fashion imaginable. I cursed, now even more loudly.
Despite these mishaps, everything still works. Praise be. Under His eye.
Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s a funny story, man. But also, if you buy the aforementioned stylish $130 charging stand, take your hardware out of the no-grip pedestals before relocating. Lastly, it’s a testament to the ruggedness of Meta’s hardware, and to my own resilience in the face of tech adversity, obviously. This isn’t a review, it’s a story of hope. Are you ready for this article to change your life? I’m certainly not.
So the 512GB Meta Quest 3, the sleeker and more powerful successor to 2020’s Meta Quest 2, currently retails for $499.99, and if you buy one now, you get a copy of the rather compelling Batman: Arkham Shadow game, as well as three months of Meta+, a rotating subscription service similar to those found on PlayStation and Xbox. You can kind of compare the Quest 3 to PSVR2, which requires a PS5 to run and retails for $549.99, and the Meta Quest 3S (a budget Meta Quest 3, essentially, or a souped-up Quest 2) is priced at $299.99. The immediate advantage to Meta Quest 3 over something like PSVR2 is its standalone, freeform nature. No cords, no mess, no base station to worry about.
Basically, you don’t need additional hardware to run the Quest 3; you simply charge it up and slap it on your beautiful, greasy head. All the processing is handled internally by its onboard Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset, and naturally, this does limit the Quest 3’s graphical prowess to that of a comparable mobile device. Unless you’re tethering it to a beastly PC, that is.
I wasn’t sent a Link Cable for my review, and therefore couldn’t test this specific feature, sadly. But I don’t need direct experience to know these kinds of things, because I have what you might call Big Brain Power. Using the Quest 3 in tandem with a formidable gaming rig is definitely of interest for future articles, though, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The hardware itself looks great, plus it’s thinner and more manageable than the Meta Quest 2, and boasts higher quality pancake lenses. Although, the front visor cameras have evolved, mostly to allow for improved color passthrough and some excellent mixed reality experiences.
You’d already know this if you watched Meta’s recent Hidden Dimensions limited online series, which features a bunch of famous people I’m utterly unfamiliar with using the headset in various lifestyle ways. I don’t put much stock in this kind of scripted marketing nonsense, but it’s still nice to know these (well-known?) strangers are definitely using the Meta Quest 3 while, uh, making music and playing football?
The new Touch Plus controllers, by the way, have also changed since the Meta Quest 2, in that the somewhat obtrusive tracking rings are gone, so now the accessories look—and feel—more trim and much less cumbersome. There’s haptics present but they feel rather ho-hum, especially when compared to those on the PSVR2 or DualSense, and there’s no in-headset rumble feature like the PSVR2 contains, a feature I’ve come to love on Sony’s device and find conspicuously missing on the Quest 3. Hand-tracking is also available here, and it’s okay, but I still prefer physical controllers.
Wearing glasses works pretty well inside the Quest 3, as Meta has added two distinct inner buttons to extend the headset’s face padding, and this allows room for most human spectacles. It still doesn’t feel ideal to wear glasses in VR, as it always seems cramped, which is why I’m seriously considering investing in some prescription VR lenses at some point. They essentially just live inside the headset so you can ditch the physical glasses.
Image quality on the Quest 3 is superb but not perfect. The device is outfitted with two 2064 × 2208p LCD panels (not OLED like PSVR2, unfortunately) which combine to offer a purported 4K experience. I often find myself preferring the PSVR2’s display to the Quest 3’s, probably because the OLED colors and stark blacks seem noticeably more vibrant, and the impressive visuals are powered by a separate powerful console. But PSVR2 uses inferior Fresnel lenses, and so Meta’s headset does provide a focus and clarity that can be somewhat lacking on Sony’s device.
I tried tons of traditional virtual reality games on the Quest 3, like Batman: Arkham Shadow, Arizona Sunshine Remake and Meta Horizon. Admittedly, I’m still getting my VR legs as it were, and basic 3D movement in virtual worlds tends to make me queasy. That aside, newer Quest games that take advantage of the beefed-up hardware look fantastic.
Side note: When I dropped into Meta Horizon for a stint, I entered a glowing establishment called MetDonald’s, and inside this restaurant were a bunch of what sounded like Mountain Dew-addled 10-year-olds, and they were climbing all over the counters, having animated conversations about fast food and literally running the drive-through, as if this was a totally normal thing for children to be doing. Maybe it was. Either way, I couldn’t stop laughing.
While meat-and-potatoes VR games play great and feel solid, what ended up totally blowing me away were the few mixed reality titles I tested, and on a complete whim, for that matter. The Quest 2 did, in fact, possess passthrough abilities, wherein you could use the headset while seeing out into your actual, real-life environment, but the Quest 3 adds glorious color to the mix. Even if the passthrough footage is still VCR grainy, playing MR software is (I believe) a complete game-changer for VR.
I mostly played a game called Starship Home, and man, was this a cool, fresh experience. You’re essentially running a spaceship inside your home, complete with watering extraterrestrial plants and scanning planets. The immersion of looking out virtual spaceship windows that are situated on your real-life indoor walls is surprisingly fun, and it felt like a ‘wow’ sort of moment. First Encounters was another enjoyable arcade-style MR game, as was relaxing meditation app Pillow, and the bonus of MR is that it doesn’t make me nauseous in the slightest.
Stock sound is pretty solid on the Quest 3 as well, although I preferred the ‘made for Meta’ Razer Hammerhead earbuds the PR team sent over, which plug into the headset via a low-latency dongle. Also sent over was the Elite battery pack strap, an accessory that prevented me from ever having to stop gaming and charge the headset. This could also be because I don’t tend to play in VR for more than two-ish hours on average. Two hours is the alleged fully-charged battery time of the Quest 3 minus the Elite strap, which supposedly adds an additional two hours. Four consecutive hours in VR sounds like a recipe for vomit, honestly.
In the end, the Quest 3’s mixed reality capabilities are largely what won me over. I really do think this is where VR is ultimately headed, but with something less bulky and more integrated into everyday life, like Meta’s own Ray-Ban smart glasses. While they’ve gotten more comfortable over time, and even with Meta’s devices selling well, headsets are still too inconvenient to seriously penetrate mainstream gaming, I think. But as hardware becomes more streamlined and the barriers to mixed reality become less cumbersome and expensive, I think the possibilities of both MR and AR will shine too bright to ignore.
Anyway, this article is already long enough, so stay tuned for further and more granular coverage of the Meta Quest 3 and its vast library of software.
Disclosure: Meta provided review product for coverage purposes.
