Meta has sold just shy of 20 million of their Quest 2 headsets. To put that number in perspective, that is about half as many as Sony has sold of the PlayStation 5. But it's a VR headset, not a living room gaming console. And if you're asking, hey, is the Quest 3 an improvement over the Quest 2? The answer is, yeah, it is. But you're also asking the wrong question. What you should be asking is, how is it that Meta has managed to lose $47 billion while being the most successful VR headset maker by a country mile? The answer, of course, is research and development. Some of which is still locked away in a lab somewhere, but some of which is finally seeing the light of day in the form of the Quest 3, or at least the simulated light of day. Welcome to augmented reality. This is incredible. Look at this. It's like there's a real chair right in the middle of the room. Like I, oh, that's a real chair. Okay, this is not the demo. We'll show you the demo. There's still a long way to go. And we're going to talk about that. But when I put on the Quest 3 for the first time, it marked, pun intended, the moment when I could clearly see the Zucks vision for the first time. And I might even be sold on it. Just like I sold this placement to our sponsor, CableMod. Their new StealthSense cables eliminate the need for sense wires. And that means no more fragile pins in your cables. Insult them all you want. Sticks and stones. Learn more at the end of the video. The simplicity of the Quest experience begins with the packaging. Just don the headset and controllers and jump right in, where the first thing you'll notice is the absolutely incredible video pass-through. Thanks to the new sensor array at the front of the headset, the Quest's first trick is to transport you not to another world, but to the exact place you're standing. Your surroundings get rendered with accurate depth and at shockingly low latency, thanks to two 4-megapixel RGB cameras and Meta's all-new time-of-flight sensor, making it easy to not just move around a little bit, but to actually do things. To show off to Yvonne, I had a conversation with her while drinking a beverage while wearing the Quest 3. She might have been more impressed if I did the dishes, but what are you going to do? To illustrate how much better it is than any other headset we've seen before, we set up a highly scientific experiment. Roll clip. Look at him go! Let's see the traditional heads. Oh! Oh, no! Oh! On top of the mixed reality sensors, the headset also makes use of four IR sensors to manage its inside-out tracking. Then at the bottom, you'll find IPD adjustment for improved comfort, a volume rocker, and three pins for charging with a stand accessory that is sold separately. On either side of the hinged temples, you'll find the 3.5mm combo jack and the USB-C port that handles both charging and display input. I really like this placement, but it should be noted that if you're connecting with a wire for SteamVR gaming, you're going to want to be sure to grab a long, flexible, right-angle USB-C cable to make routing it a little bit easier. And I'd also recommend a cable tie or similar to act as a strain relief so you don't ruin your visual immersion. LTTstore.com. Speaking of, man, does this headset ever look good. Once you've dialed it in, you will be very impressed. The dual 2064x2208 displays provide you with 25 pixels per degree of clarity and a 110-degree field of view at up to 120 Hz. Also, gone are the Fresnel lenses replaced with pancake optics like we saw on the Quest Pro, something only seen at this price point on the yet-to-be-released in North America Pico 4 headset from ByteDance. Of course, to hit that price point, Meta had to make some sacrifices. And sadly, those displays are still LCD, which, coming from the incredible color richness, contrast, and motion clarity from the OLED displays on the PSVR 2 or the big screen beyond, leaves something to be desired. The Quest 3 also lacks eye-tracked foveated rendering to improve performance. You can decrease render quality outside of the sweet spot, but without eye-tracking hardware, it just ends up looking kind of blurry whenever you happen to shift your gaze off-center. Of course, you can just turn that off, though, because the Qualcomm XR2 Gen 2 chipset onboard this thing somehow manages to push 4.5 million pixels up to 120 times per second in real applications and games, while also managing the 6 degrees of freedom tracking for the headset and the controllers. There's no other way to put this other than it is an absolute beast, and I was blown away by the immersiveness of games and other VR experiences on this headset. But all of that horsepower comes at a cost, and the first one is heat. The outside of it, even though it's made of plastic and it feels like it shouldn't, gets hot, almost as hot as you'll look, in our lightweight 3D-down jacket from lttstore.com. Really? That's our pitch for this? You're gonna look 90% awesome and 10% like a complete moron. At least you won't be out there long enough for many people to see you, because the other downside is battery life. While a little over two hours is sufficient for most gaming sessions, it's a big step down from the Quest 2, and augmented reality experiences tank the battery life even further. Now, high-speed charging could help to mitigate this, but we found that 15 minutes on the wall was worth about 15 minutes away from it. So if you were to work a full eight-hour workday in Meta Horizon's workrooms, you'd probably have to hot-swap between your two headsets, assuming, of course, that you don't just leave it plugged in. Quick note, while we were working on editing this video, Meta added a battery saver mode that could help with this, but we don't have hard numbers for the improvement yet. Moving on, I love the improvements they've made to the controllers. The easily swappable single AA design is back, but gone are the crummy battery covers. Check this out. No slippage, thanks to Latch. Praise be to Latch. They also got rid of the one ring to track them all, so they now resemble the Touch Pro controllers that are found on the Quest Pro, without the IR cameras that allow the Pro controllers to handle their own inside-out tracking. On that note, we did notice some times when poor location estimates or just flat-out tracking failures did affect our ability to enjoy fast-paced games, but overall, tracking feels significantly improved over the Quest 2. From an ergonomics standpoint, we let a few people from around the office try the controllers out, and it seems like they fit well in a wide variety of hand sizes, but those with wider hands may need to employ a British tea-sipping grip, that is, if they bother to use controllers at all. That's right, the Quest 3 does hand tracking, and it's so-so. While pinching to interact with Windows feels molto bene, the hand tracking would often miss the mark on a grab or wig out entirely, even in optimal conditions. These issues were frequent enough that I found myself almost exclusively using controllers in my augmented reality experiences. The few that actually work right now. Building LEGO in VR would be a lot cheaper than in real life, but you can't do it yet. And the experiences that are available? Shooting enemies in my actual apartment is pretty neat, I guess, but for the most part, they kind of just feel like tech demos, and not even fresh ones. Remember Face Raiders on 3DS? And when they're not fun tech demos, they're work applications. But I'd argue that those are the more convincing pitch for the future. I had a great experience working on the script for this video while wearing the headset. I was up and running in Meta Horizon's workrooms in no time, and being able to shut out the world and surround myself with three giant monitors was great for when I needed to hunker down and focus, with passthrough always available, making it a breeze to quickly check if my bosses were at their desks in case I wanted to slack off and watch some YouTube. Speaking of which, I'm sure you've seen the myriad creative viral stunts that people have been pulling using the Quest 3. I too tried my hand at some of those shenanigans, like cooking while wearing the headset, and honestly, I would not recommend it. While the idea of having a video of demonstrating the recipe is awesome in theory, the cameras just aren't good enough to gauge the quality of your work. Is this ground pork fully cooked? I sure hope so. Holding a spoon? Well, you better have a controller in the other. I'm just gonna keep putting my laptop in my above-range microwave like a normal person. Oh, shit! And that ignores the motion sickness that you might experience with passthrough, like my wife Yvonne did. You see, one of the downsides of its on-the-fly 3D mapping is that sometimes it needs to make on-the-fly adjustments. And even if you aren't prone to motion sickness, this camera strangeness can be a major distraction in augmented reality, like when the headset doesn't understand what is flat when going around corners or doesn't allow you to take your UI downstairs lest it float off into the sky. Also, I was really hoping that I'd be able to pin a video in the corner of my vision rather than being required to pick up my things and carry them around the house with me. Connecting to your PC by cable still works great, though, providing you with all of the PC VR experiences you could want. And, surprisingly, connecting wirelessly via Air Link was just about as seamless, as long as you're on a capable wireless network. We were using Wi-Fi 6E. With a stable enough connection, you can play rhythm games even at bit rates of up to 250 megabit per second with very serviceable image quality, or you can even push it higher if you tweak developer settings. Your mileage may vary. Wired or wireless, connecting to a PC does use the Oculus Link software, though, and it feels pretty out of date compared to the modern Quest UI and sends you right back to the camera-less stone age, locking you out of any kind of pass-through unless you close the Link software entirely. And if you have an older PC VR headset with outside-in tracking, you still can't beat that smoothness even this many generations into inside-out. So it's okay, but it could be better, which is kind of how I would describe the audio on the integrated speakers. I mean, I want to make this abundantly clear. It is a lot better than the Quest 2, and the spatial audio wizardry works surprisingly well, making objects sound like they are actually around you. But the Quest 2 is a really low bar, and the bass is still very much lacking, with the speakers distorting sometimes even at lower volumes. ♪ The mic, on the other hand, is pretty serviceable, especially considering there's just the one on the front of the headset. But it does sound a little bit processed and very, very noise-cancelled, at least when you're recording. Coming back out of VR, I've read some complaints about the head strap needing a lot of adjustment, but neither Adam nor I felt that this was its biggest issue. For us, it was the cushion, or rather the lack thereof. I expect to have some headset face after a couple of hours in VR, but what I don't expect is the unevenness of the pressure points. And while you can replace the whole thing with a more sanitary silicone one, that's gonna run you 40 real-world dollars. For this flimsy thing? Clearly, Meta hopes to subsidize the cost of this headset with ludicrous pricing on their official accessories. Who do these guys think they are? Actually, come to think of it, maybe they're all onto something. Speaking of which, we should talk about price. The Quest 3 is packed full of great new performance and features, but that's gonna run you an extra $150 over the 256-gig Quest 2. The good news, though, is that the Quest 2 is not going anywhere. Rather than discontinue it, Meta is positioning it alongside the Quest 3, though I don't really know if I would go that route, at least not brand new. Let's lay out the options for each kind of buyer, then. If you don't have a VR headset, or you're unsure, the second-hand market is flush with cheap Oculus Quest 2s right now that are gonna give you a solid VR experience at a crazy good price. I would just stick with that. On that note, by the way, I've got the same advice for folks with an outside-in tracked PC headset already. The image quality of the Quest 3 is good enough that it would be the go-to at this price for PC VR, but the tracking just isn't on par, and I think that you'd be better off sticking with what you have, saving your pennies, and waiting for a big-screen Beyond or Valve's rumored next-gen headset. Or maybe for them to crack the code with the PSVR 2, which I've heard might be usable on PC sometime in the near future. For the third category of buyers, though, who want an upgraded standalone VR headset and maybe want to dabble in AR, Quest 3 legitimately is a really exciting option if the software catalog continues to grow and improve. I really like the thing, Adam really likes the thing, and ironically, actually, I think for both of us, this was the first thing to make us sit up and go, wow, I'm kind of hyped for the Apple Vision Pro. Like, if this is how good it can be at this price, just imagine what the Vision Pro is gonna be like. I mean, heck, we won't even need TVs or gaming monitors. We can all move into shoebox-sized apartments, just like the Zuck envisioned. All we need is a bed and a segue to our sponsor. CableMod, their new cables featuring their exclusive StealthSense technology eliminates the need for sense wires to run from the GPU to your power supply. Instead, the connector uses a hidden bridge to tell the GPU that, psst, hey, there's 600 delicious watts for you over here. Just waiting. I got you. Using this hidden bridge instead of a sense wire means there's no tiny pins in the cables to dislodge. Those sound really fragile. You don't want that. Dislodged pins can lead to issues like 100% fan utilization or black screens, so you'll be saving yourself a headache. And studies show headaches hurt your little noggin. If you want all the performance with higher reliability and cleaner aesthetics, which you should want, check out CableMod's StealthSense cables on Amazon or CableMod's own website at the link below. If you guys enjoyed this video, why not check out our review of the opposite VR product, the Big Screen Beyond. You'll have to see what I mean when you watch it. It's for not interacting with the world around you or other people.
