A big improvement over the Quest 2 for graphics and mixed reality – you won’t find anything better in 2023
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PRICE 128GB, £400 (£480 inc VAT) from meta.com
Apple’s Vision Pro (see issue 347, p46) reset expectations for mixed reality, but two big things stand in its way: a likely price of £3,500 and uncertainty over the release date in the UK. Until now, your best mixed reality choice was the Meta Quest 2 – but the Meta Quest 3 improves on it in just about every way.
For a start, the visor is 40% slimmer than its predecessor, which makes the Quest 3 far more comfortable to wear. I felt a noticeable difference from the top-heavy Quest 2.
Meta has also ditched the spacer for glasses wearers. Instead, you adjust the “facial interface” using two black buttons inside the headset, which will give you more space if needed. There’s also a new IPD wheel for adjusting the distance between the lenses. The stock settings let me wear the Quest 3 with my glasses on easily, but it’s simple to make tweaks.
Easy setup
Setting up the Meta Quest 3 is painless. The headset guides you through the process, including pairing the Quest 3 with the Meta Quest app. You can even connect the headset to your Wi-Fi network using a QR code on your phone, which you can see thanks to the headset’s full-colour passthrough powered by two RGB cameras on the front of the visor.
These cameras, a depth sensor and the Quest 3’s passthrough also come in handy when setting up your playspace. There are two options for operating in virtual reality: Roomscale and Stationary. Stationary gives you a circle to work within, and is ideal if you’re seated when using the Quest 3.
Roomscale pulls in the visuals of your room from the passthrough and gives you a suggested playspace that you can further adjust with your controllers. I found I always needed to tweak things a little, and walking around the room helped the automatic boundary set at the right limits.
The passthrough even takes things a step further for playing in mixed reality rather than virtual reality. During setup for your first mixed reality experience, you’ll be asked to highlight or create your room’s walls using the controller. After that, you’ll be asked to look around the room so the headset can scan for any obstacles. You’ll see a virtual mesh of polygons cover your furniture, and then you’re ready to play in mixed reality.
