The original Meta Quest kicked off a new generation for stand-alone VR, freeing users from the tethers of a cabled connection to a PC or game console. In actuality, this ended up being more of a fork than a complete takeover of the medium, as VR has continued to evolve in both tethered and untethered forms, like the Valve Index and PlayStation VR2, and cord-free devices that sacrifice on visual quality in exchange for a more hassle-free experience. The Meta Quest 3 is the latest iteration of all-in-one VR, aiming to close the graphical gap between it and its high-end corded cousins, while also pushing the augmented reality envelope further than we’ve seen as yet in a consumer-level headset.
The Quest 3 doesn’t vary drastically in its basic design from its predecessor, which launched in 2020, but it does come with a number of improvements. It’s built around the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor, which promises twice the graphics performance as the Quest 2, along with 8GB of RAM versus the Quest 2’s 6GB. It also upgrades to six camera sensors, over the Quest 2’s four, two of which are RGB cameras that deliver full-color passthrough. The display also gets a resolution bump, up to 2064x2208 pixels per eye, which is not only an improvement from 1832x1920 on the Quest 2, but also more than the PSVR2’s 2000x2040 and the Index's 1440x1600.
At 515g the headset is a tad heavier than the Quest 2’s 503g, but not so much to feel cumbersome. There’s a new Y-shaped design to the cloth strap, which still adjusts via two sliding clasps on the back of your head. It’s a definite step down from more premium headsets like the Index and PSVR2, but like with Quest 2, you can swap in a higher-end head strap if you want a more comfortable experience. Likewise, I didn’t love the default face gasket which, while soft, has a rubbery feeling to it. It wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, but I found it rather warm on my face, and it got quite sweaty after only 15 or so minutes of relatively low-energy play.
The controllers have been changed a bit too. They’ve lost the bulky ring design in favor of a more streamlined grip, which gives them a bit better feel in the hand. I found them relatively unremarkable otherwise – they functioned as expected, but didn’t stand out to me in any way.
Visually, on the other hand, the graphics and resolution upgrade is immediately noticeable. Colors are crisp, text is readable, and I noticed little to no aliasing in the demos I tried. While it didn’t look quite as good as the visual feast of Horizon Call of the Mountain on PSVR2, the gap was small, and its extremely impressive considering the all-in-one nature of the hardware. It’s also a clear improvement over the Quest 2. While I didn’t have an actual Quest 2 unit to compare with side-by-side, one of the demos I tested had a Quest 2 emulation feature, letting me toggle my view between the Quest 3’s capabilities and what it, in theory, would have looked like on a Quest 2. Toggling between views, the Quest 2 was a clear step down – textures were muddier, shadows disappeared, and text changed from legible to blurry. This was, of course, an emulated demo designed to show how stark the differences could be, so I can’t say yet if it is truly that dramatic a difference, but if this was anything close to reality, it’s an impressive showing for the new device.
The Quest 3’s other significant area of improvement is in the realm of augmented reality. Tapping twice on the side of the headband switches the headset into passthrough mode, giving you a detailed look at your surroundings. Gone is the grainy, monochrome passthrough view of the Quest 2 and most other VR headsets – the Quest 3 delivers a high-fidelity, full-color view of the world around you. The view looks excellent, and while it’s not quite picture perfect to reality, it’s near enough that you could mostly forget you’re wearing a headset. That said, there were a few spots around the edges, and particularly around my feet, where the view would warp a little bit and give away the illusion.
All of the Quest’s existing game library will be playable on the Quest 3, and likewise there won’t be any games that are exclusive to the new device, at least for the time being. That said, there will be plenty of games – more than 50 either available at launch or coming soon – that will receive upgrades and mixed reality features to take advantage of the new hardware. In First Encounters, a “welcome to Quest 3” demo experience, the view of the room around me gave way to an alien planet as I shot holes in the walls and rounded up little colorful fuzzballs into a critter-capture device at my feet. Another game, Bam!, had me set a tabletop-like arena literally on a tabletop in front of me; inside it, little robots fought for possession time of a crown, boxing and shooting each other to knock the crown loose.
The most ambitious game I played was a bit of Assassin’s Creed Nexus, a new VR-only entry in the long-running Ubisoft franchise. Nexus is a first-person game, putting you behind the eyes of several beloved Assassin’s Creed protagonists, including Kassandra from AC Odyssey, Connor from AC3, and Ezio from AC2. There's a mixture of movement options, including the parkour movement that AC is known for, as well as climbing that reminded me of Horizon Call of the Mountain. Some bits of the controls felt great – ducking behind cover and popping out to take down a guard with a throwing knife, for example – while others were a bit clunkier, like when I needed to hold down the parkour movement button with my right thumb while also needing to use that thumb to adjust my movement direction, causing me to miss my jump and fall into the canals of Rome.
From what I played, the Quest 3 seems like an easy upgrade for anyone interested in mixed reality, or those who have been curious about VR but skipped on the Quest 2. If you’re coming from the Quest 2, however, it’ll be a bit more of a decision to make. The upgrades are clear – on the graphics and performance front, it’s an obvious improvement – but if you’re just a casual VR user, I have to wonder if the improvements are worth springing for an upgraded device, especially given the Quest 3’s higher starting price of $499.
We’ll have a lot more to say about and will help answer that question in our full review of the Meta Quest 3 headset in the coming weeks. The Quest 3 launches on October 10, and pre-orders are available now. Until then, be sure to check out our roundup of news from Meta Connect.
