MIXED REALITY
Meta Quest 3 gives MR a platform on which to shine – but what can it offer to games?
John Carmack has never been one to bite his tongue. Since his resignation from Meta last year, however – accompanied by an internal announcement, leaked to the press, that he “wearied of the fight” – he has had no reason to hold back with his opinions on its strategies. In late September, as his previous employer prepared to ship the first Quest 3 units, with MR (mixed reality) the headline feature, Carmack took to Twitter. “I remain unconvinced that mixed reality applications are any kind of an engine for increasing headset sales,” he wrote. “High-quality passthrough is great, but I just don’t see applications built around integrating rendering with your real-world environment as any kind of a killer app. I consider it [an] interesting and challenging technology looking for a justification.” The Id co-founder capped off the post in the most John Carmack way possible, offering a cash bet to anyone who could prove him wrong.
Carmack’s words go through our head as we first place the Quest 3 onto it. The hardware, though, offers a pretty strong counterargument. The passthrough feed from its dual RGB cameras is sufficiently high-fidelity and responsive to make a plausible stand-in for actual reality. Handy for a quick glance at our phone or PC, yes, but it also makes it possible to move to another room – or even another floor – without removing the headset, something we’d never have dared attempt with its predecessor.
The hand tracking, meanwhile, feels something like magic. Extending a digit out in front of your face, it’s easy to scroll through app listings as you would with a touchscreen – except that here your finger is resting on thin air, meaning that you have an extra axis of interaction at your disposal. Without thinking about it, we instinctively grab at a menu to bring it closer, and it’s quietly thrilling to discover that it simply works. Finer control can be hit or miss, especially when dealing with something that’s not immediately in front of you, requiring some shaky pointing off into the distance. But at its best, this is exactly the kind of naturalistic interaction that has always been core to XR’s promise. At this point, though, we’ve barely left the menus. So, to Carmack’s point: what of the experiences made possible by this technology?
