Meta Quest 3 In-Depth Review!

[Music] hey everybody it's Norman from tested and today I'm going to reviewing the meta Quest 3 yes it's out this week some of you may actually already have it and I've actually been using this review unit that meta sent me for the past week and a half so today I'm going to dive deep into the hardware my experiences hopefully answer some of the questions you had coming out of its announcement at metac connect uh just over two weeks ago now and share how it Compares with the Quest 2 the quest Pro and what its unique features brings to VR today uh let's dive in so a review like this typically I'd start out with the display something that we assume is the most important part of a VR headset uh but today I'm actually going to start with the lens the Optics because the biggest Improvement in my opinion between the quest 3 and its predecessor The Quest 2 is the lens system it uses the same pancake Optics that the quest Pro introduced last year actually it is technically a iteration on top of that but they are almost exactly the same in my opinion and what that means is that you're getting not only improved image quality and Clarity across entire higher eyebox but also uh benefits in terms of the weight and the weight distribution of the headset as well it's a much smaller form factor and what's in front of you uh the clarity really is the the standout feature here so paired with the LCD panels two LCD panels This Time uh you're getting basically a crisp view across your entire field of view um which means not only more that you can see in a scene whether it's p through mixed reality or inside if fully immersed VR game but also uh in terms of finding the perfect fit in previous VR headsets when you're using forel lenses or hybrid lensings is finding that sweet spot was something we'd always have to fight for what that eyebox size was where your eyes have to fit and then how much of a clear image could you see here not only is that sweet spot super easy to find with even minor jostling and adjustments you're not going to lose focus not going to lose Clarity where your eyes are but you also see that clear image and testing that field of view with the what is my field of view application I actually found that the quest 3 field of view was better than I expected horizontally I was able to get 10° field of view while wearing glasses now that's using the closest face relief distance but still adding a little bit of space between the lenses and my eyes because of my glasses but without my glasses doing that same test I was actually able to achieve that 110 degree field of view that they claimed in their marking materials vertical field of view I actually got 100° when pressing my eyes right on the lenses Which is higher than their stated 98 degre so huge improvement over the Quest 2 and even I think better than the quest Pro in terms of the feud of view now that's also paired with these new LCD panels all three of these headsets in front of me the Quest 2 Quest 3 and Quest Pro have a different way of display panels if you recall the Quest 2 was a little bit of a cheat they used a single LCD panel that uh was in landscape orientation and so there were some pixels in between in that stereo overlap that you never get to see wasting those pixels and also you wouldn't get true ipd adjustment you had these presets uh as well as a virtual ipd adjustment um in the actual display itself Quest Pro did go back to two displays so two LCDs here and with very similar resolution uh render resolution as the Quest 2 but also got local dimming as well as a quantum dot layer for better colors and a relatively bright headset uh given the pancake Optics Quest 3 uses higher resolution panels for each eye so the resolution now is actually 264 by 2208 per I very close to that 2160 X 2160 that we saw in headsets like the HP Reverb G2 and actually a higher pixel density at 24 pixels per degree now there's a cave out there because this is still running a mobile s So Meta actually has the render Target of these panels as 1680 by 1760 per IE so what the native uh desktop UI and what most games are targeting at 1X resolution is not going to be the full resolution of the panels itself you're going to actually have to add anti- aliasing or super sampling after the fact if you're Tethered to pcvr for example to make the most out of those panels that's still they say a 3% increase over what the Quest 2 and the quest Pros native resolution was and that was 1440 by 1584 and that is noticeable in things like the user interface once you boot up the home screen the menus uh everything is a little crisper and sharper even though I can tell a little bit anti-aliasing is still needed having the render resolution be super sample being higher than the native resolution of the headsets actually uh a preferred thing to do in VR headsets it's why when you wear a the valve index or the big screen beyond what you want to actually have steam VR set to is higher than the resolution because that compensates for some of the pixels the detail that's lost in the lens Distortion now that may be minimized because it's using pancake lenses here but there's still going to be a little bit of warping and adjustments that the lens has to compensate for to wrap it around your field of view and so to have the default buffer be lower than the Tet resolution and not even higher than that I think speaks to so where mobile VR is today that's one advantage that native PC VR headsets still have over mobile VR now does support up to uh 120 hertz out of the box in an experimental mode uh you can run 80 Herz 72 Herz 90 Herz as well uh games will basically run at 90 HZ here as as a default setting but you can turn on 120 htz uh if developers want to enable that as well as if you want to use something like virtual desktop or pcvr streaming uh Oculus link airlink will support 120 HZ as well that's nice that that came right out of the box now while the resolution of the LCD panels here I think are much improved over the two and even the pro uh there are some tradeoffs so it's the contrast levels and the black levels I find a bit lacking there's no local dim here so if you're running pcvr streaming for example which started supporting local dimming uh earlier this year uh you're going to see more compression artifacts being more noticeable and even things like watching a movie in a virtual Cinema the black levels I did miss the pure blacks of the OLED panels in big screen Beyond uh and the local dimming those slightly better black levels that I found in the quest Pro that was noticeable here here everything the dark levels are basically very very dark gray looks like an LCD panel though with those pancake Optics no mirror there's very little almost no uh God rays and flaring at all so it's a little bit of Bloom that I noticed on super high contrast scenes uh but very impressed by the Optics and the panel combination now something that's not really talked about with the the headset and a lot of people haven't mentioned is like the quest Pro the design of the Optics and lenses actually has the lenses angled The Meta Optics team decided that with these pancake lenses and to achieve maybe the field of view the horizontal field of view they wanted what they did is they took what normally would be an LCD panle done this way and they rotated it about 20 22° uh tilted in it's something that not it's noticeable if you capture uh video from the headset with the meta developer Hub and you'll see that the image is actually offset outward so to compensate for the actual physical uh tint uh tilt of the screen so it's tilted this way and tilted this way and there's couple of interesting kind of artifacts of that that's worth discussing uh first of all it means that that's I think that's how they achieve their 10910 degree horizontal field of view so you're getting a little bit wider by tilting the screens that way it also means that you're actually uh the way the the lenses are oriented you're actually getting more of a field of view in the lower uh area where uh maybe your hands would be so in your in your in your whole field of view the nearfield stuff typically happens in the lower half of your peripheral vision uh and so they're sacrificing a little bit of detail for example on the upper right and upper left parts of your field of view uh which which is noticeable when I ran that fov test if you really Press Your Eyes against the lenses and you want to peek into the corners you can see actually not where the lens or the not where the panels necessarily cut off but where the render actually stops rendering you see a little bit of kind of uh I describe it maybe like this kind of scalloping in the rendering uh in the top corners but the most interesting artifact and something that I can't not see be that uh that's due to the these panels being tilted is actually uh the Christmas of horizontal line so if again if you look at this analog here and if on a traditional headset or older headsets uh you would have the pixels basically be perpendicular to your horizon uh and these vertical planes so things like menus web browsers the frame of a video boorder if you are looking straight on and your level you would see a straight line where those pixels are but because they angle the LCD panels uh you actually see more aliasing along those horizontal planes it's noticeable if you put the headset on and you tilt your head about 22 degrees or so you can actually see that aliasing change in just the the menu and the home screen which it's something that I can't not see it's something that bugs me a little bit when I'm watching a movie in a big virtual Cinema and I'm watching a high bit rate 4K movie which looks incredible in this headset but the borders maybe aren't super sampled and so I'm noticing that extra aliasing I get why they did it for the field of view benefits and I think they did have some advantages with the lower resolution screens in making text uh be less of a you see less of a screen door effect when you have curved objects and rendering text uh when you have the pixels at this angle but for things like those horizontal planes boxes web browser windows it is something that I have noticed and it sticks out I don't think they're going to change their styling because I think the benefits outweigh some of those advantages so hopefully that's compensated in the future with some extra super sampling in that home screen menu now the other major benefit of these pancake lenses is that the whole optic stack is now compressed and so the whole headset while technically weighs a little bit more a few more grams than the Quest 2 feels a lot lighter it's actually ergonomically such a better headset to wear uh because the weight doesn't feel like it's protruded as much from your face now there's still all the compute all the battery is still in the front here and as you can see there's actually a vent around the front here that's what this ring is for uh the headset does get a little bit warm when you're using you can actually feel that mostly at the top here you can feel that that heat heating up uh but using even the uh soft straps which I hated with the Quest 2 the soft straps that come with the quest 3 are very usable uh I did still find myself adjusting it just because the way the soft straps would rest on my ears and how high they would sit in the back of my head it wasn't that the headset felt like it was going to fall off or you know with fast movements it was going to slip off but I always wanted to tug the back of the head strap just back a little bit because I'm so used to the the cupping and the cushioning of a hard head strap so they do sell a new Elite head strap for the quest 3 which is why I have used here and after a couple days of using the soft strap I just have the elite head strap um on all the time now installing it is super easy it it's actually not compatible with the Quest 2 Elite headstrap not only because there's now the headphone jack as well as the usb3 ports on the sides here but it's actually a bigger design it's a taller design and I want to say the material here the plastic here is thicker than it was on The Quest 2 so those Quest 2 Elite straps famous ly had U material issues where many users had them snap on them I had mine snap on on after a couple months of use uh this so far feels pretty sturdy uh and having that full cushion over the back of uh my skull is just that much more comfortable I feel like it's an essential accessory if not this head strap than any third- party hardhead strap over the cloth straps on the quest 3 uh something I was really also impressed by and surprised by was how well the facial interface also fit over my glasses I talked in my preview for The Quest 3 about being concerned that I would miss the the ergonomics of the quest Pro uh with its Halo style headstrap the pressure was on the forehead but I would see no pressure on my cheeks no pressure on that facial interface and actually get additional peripheral field of view and comfort when using mixed reality pass through actually found that the facial interface on the the the material and also the the pressure when using the elite headstrap not bad at all on the quest 3 here to a point where uh my glasses fit really easily inside this facial interface um with the elite headstrap it didn't feel like my glasses were stuck in here I didn't feel pressure on my temples uh or my glasses pushing against my face and the facial interface does have four levels of relief for people with thicker glasses different face shapes I was able to use my glasses comfortably on a regular basis with it being the closest setting which was something I didn't believe that I was able to do so maximizing the benefits of the field of view while still wearing my glasses uh I haven't had a chance to live with the new zeni Optical lens inserts but at metac connect they did have some of those samples for me to use in a test run and using that I actually found that the inserts pressed against my cheeks and my eyebrows a little bit when I was using the nearest facial interface setting so I will have to test that later but I suspect that given how comfortable these are with my glasses that glasses are going to be just fine that you don't need to actually wear contacts or go with the inserts if you don't want to uh if you wear glasses uh they work just well in this interface they will sell different colors as well one thing I wish is that you had a choice between the black the the salmon orange or that cool blue color out of the box and you have to spend an extra 50 bucks to get a different head strap and facial interface color but I understand where they're going with trying to sell aftermarket accessories with the quest 3 they've also changed up some of the layout of the hardware buttons and controls so you have the power button near now here on the left side underneath there is that ipd dial which does use that range of uh 53 to 75 mm though technically it's really 58 to 70 mm of Hardware adjustment um but they're giving themselves that extra 5 millim of space because of the clarity of that eyebox uh then there's also the volume buttons on the other side there are these three contact Chargers to use with their charging dock which we'll talk about in a little bit but a peculiar design decision I thought was putting the headphone jack the 3.5mm headphone jack on the right side now for the vast majority of my testing here I use the built-in sound which I thought was improved much improved Over The Quest 2 it's much louder to a point where I never felt like I needed to use those Max volumes but spatially the sounds is actually really nice if you're in a movie environment or in a game environment where there's headlock spatial sound you actually I felt like the sound using the built-in speakers was more spatial if that makes any sense uh to a point where I didn't feel like I needed to use headphones at all but if you do use earbuds uh the headphone jack being on the right side that's non-traditional most headphone Jacks are on the left side for headsets and if you have accessories like you know this set of Logitech headphones where there's a shorter cord on the right um and a longer cord on the left that would work because these are designed for the headphone jack to be on the left side where the shorter side is your left stereo and the the longer side is your right stereo so accessories like this uh aren't going to work well with the headphone jack placement here that's unfortunate so in addition to changing up the location of the hardware buttons and some of the inputs on the quest 3 they also changed up the placement of the sensors and it's really interesting to see that between the Quest 2 Pro and 3 the camera arrangements are all in different places which tells me that their Inside Out track algorithms can be calibrated for any arrangement of camera placements you just are have trade-offs in terms of the visibility and the field of view for the tracking as well as I guess the resolution of that pass through and pass through mixed reality is one of the big standout features on the quest 3 so let's talk about that first in the front are two tracking cameras that are paired with two RGB cameras so to get color pass through the quest Pro had a single RGB camera that did a color overlay over the reprojected geometry of its tracking cameras and it was relatively low resolution uh that RGB camera here you have two 4 megapixel cameras and it's now stereo Imaging and those stereo color images overlay on top of again another reprojected image that gives you true depth for near field and farway objects it's not just like looking at stereo video there's actually a reprojection going that's why you see that kind of warping when you bring objects close up to your face because it wants to get that real geometry or really show perfect stereo imagery uh for these near field and farfield objects uh the pass through video as you can see both with the video capture as well as some through the lens Imaging that we did is good and I think much improved for sure over the quest Pro but I would still call the images a little bit grainy but when we're talking about pastu mix routy we're not only looking for clarity we're also looking for how well the camera systems and the display systems adjust to things like exposure and also fast movement the frame rate and that's where I feel like these cameras still fall short of what we want for really compelling mixed reality pass through that feels more seamless with the real world uh in a perfect lighting environment the images are clear so you can look around your living room with natural sunlight you can even pull up your phone and yes your emails may be visible on your phone uh and exposure compensation is good it's relatively fast it's not doing any kind of HDR processing where it's uh compiling multiple exposures so it is kind of like on a camera on a video camera it's adjusting the exposure on the fly when you're looking outside a window for example versus looking at an indoor environment so you can it's prioritizing visualizing detail uh over uh over a balance of exposure now where that runs into some hiccups is when you're looking at screens like on your phone or your computer display so your phone screen is actually brighter uh pretty bright compared to a normal indoor lighting environment and so the kind of uh the waiting it does the exposure rating the metering it does on the brightness of the scene doesn't always react or compensate fast enough so that you can make things like your phone's more visible versus looking at someone's face um so if you're outdoor and you're looking at your phone that might work if you're indoor and you're looking at your phone things might be shifting a little bit lower light environments you can definitely tell that they're bumping up the iso and they're lowering some of that shutter speed so uh you're also not getting a ton of fast movement tracking so I do see kind of ghosting of images as I move my hand roll fast uh in front of the frame something very noticeable when you're moving like the rendered uh controller the touch Plus controller in front which is a perfect you know 90 HZ representation of that controller uh the video image of your hands is while aligned and is basically where that rendered controller is uh doesn't keep up with that rendering as well uh if you're looking at a computer monitor I found looking at for example a desktop monitor really hard to look at in in a in a low light evening scene in my home office I wanted to be able to not only you know see my keyboard but also see the images on my desktop on my computer monitor uh that's not going to work well with this technology I would still call this fixity uh the point shoot days if you're talking the equivalent of camera Technologies we've maybe moved beyond the you know the the 640x480 black and white cameras the low res cameras the VHS era of of of p through mixed reality but we're still kind of in the early point and shoot digital day still waiting for the DSLR mirrorless days the 4K days of past through mix reality which means there's a lot still to develop and that could be a combination of not only choosing the right uh lenses and the right sensors for those pass through cameras but also the so's having enough for that bandwidth to process the images um this is maybe a case where apple with all the Imaging pipeline uh that they've develop for the camera systems on their iPhones that all that is inherited on the Vision Pro and so they may be doing more processing for that imagery although still to be tested the demo that did of the Vision Pro was in a very controlled even lighting indoor environment uh but the quest 3 also has one additional sensor that the Quest 2 and the quest Pro didn't have has a new depth sensor an IR sensor using structured light to map out not only a room but also in theory also your hands and nearfield objects so this was something that was rumored to be in development and developers had confirmed that they had earlier developer prototypes of the quest Pro had this but meta decided not to include it in the final version of the shipping Quest Pro uh but something that I think adds a lot and has a lot of potential in mix reality for the quest 3 I wanted to walk through what that experience what it brings to the table with this Center depth sensor so first of all it can be used for room scanning so generating Your Guardian boundary previously you would you know set your floor height and you would use use your touch controllers to draw a boundary in the room uh here there's something of a more automated boundary system by default so when you put on your headset if you're in a new space you can actually see the mesh tiling kind of being generated around the room as well as a boundary which you can then adjust after the fact so it simplifies that process uh if you don't want to draw your own boundary which I still like think I prefer to do because I sometimes draw boundary over objects in my space that I I'm okay having well within the confines it also is used in room scanning for mixed reality experiences so you can look around you can actually in addition to generating a play Space a kind of 2D boundary in a play Space you can also have one room in your house in your play environment mapped out using a mesh uh and so this is kind of like uh psvr2 did this you would actually look around the room and you would see again the meshing the recognition of tables and and couches at least the shapes of those objects and chairs and your walls and based on that mesh it actually saves not only that geometry as a mesh data but then it tries to infer what are walls so it will generate these wall boundaries uh these planes that actually developers can use as interactive elements in games like first encounter or things like figman XR and what's interesting is the way those two systems interact so both the geometric mesh map of the world as well as the semantic understanding of what are planes and tables what the quest three can't do right now is it can't semantically know what is a couch and what is a table automatically like in The Quest 2 like in the Press Quest Pro you can with that play Space you can manually map out these volumetric spaces rectangles right now so you can say this rectangled area is a couch this is a table this is a shelf this rectangle around the wall is a door or a window but that's a manual process you have to generate to give the headset semantic understanding of your area and applications right now don't really take advantage of that figment XR is a really great example where you can actually choose between the mesh representation that uh of the world uh which then gives you occlusion you know know objects can hide behind a couch uh in first encounters that you can see those aliens actually hide behind objects as well as pop out from the walls but in figin XR you switch between your mesh or your planes these kind of pre-mapped out objects that you use and I actually preferred having in some instances having those planes because you can have this flat table you can set objects and if you have physics interacting with those planes with a flat table with a a coffee table uh those physics are more believable um or more convincing uh it's unfortunate that you can only generate these pled objects in rectangles right now and I a lot of table surfaces in my house are circular my work area my coffee table are circular and you can only draw rectangles right now but I think developers in the future will have access to combine both the mesh information as well as the semantic understanding of these planes and take advantage of that I just don't see a ton of experiences using that right now uh the other thing that the depth data potentially can do is get you better occlusion near full occlusion which isn't available right now so one of the things that for example when you have hand tracking and you put your hand in front uh of of your of your menu the ghost representation that outline of your hand does surface above a menu so you have virtual occlusion but the video of your hand isn't mapped on top of that and that was something that was really impressive when I did the apple Vision Pro demo was that it did hand occlusion uh a video representation of the hand over that reprojected mapping of what it recognized your fingers to be I'm a little skeptical that the depth sensor here that the hand occlusion will work because meta says it's coming later this year uh just because of the warping that I see in the mixed reality pass through especially that near field warping if you put your hand up and you put a phone up to your face that geometry isn't perfect it's a little wavy you know lines aren't perfectly parallel or perpendicular um so when they enable the hand occlusion that nearfield depth sensor enabled um mapping I'm not sure if that's going to be as good as what people will expect or something that I would even prefer over having like the ghosted outline of my hand right now but depth API is something that they announced at metac connect and something developers will be able to tap into so not only using the mesh but in real time you know having things virtual objects uded and hidden behind you know doors for example uh and cabinets and a better interfacing between the virtual objects and the real world that seems to be the potential with this depth sensor so more to be tested when that becomes unlocked by applications in the future now let's also talk about the touch controllers these are now the touch plus controllers uh big question was that since they removed the tracking ring with these controllers compared to the Quest 2 how would this compare now it's kind of this hybrid between the Quest 2 and the quest Pro controllers physically they look very similar to The Quest Pro controllers um geometrically I mean the 3D model for the quest Pro controllers basically works for the quest 3 minus the little cameras that they have on the top because the quest Pro controllers do their own Inside Out tracking Quest Pro controllers weigh lot more you can feel the extra weight and so I'm actually really happy to return to a lighter form factor on the quest 3 controllers the fewer IR tracking Rings actually found wasn't a hindrance so the quest 3 touch plus controllers are tracked with ir camera or IR lights here so the camera's on the headset look at these IR lights there's actually an additional IR light here at the base so when you're pointing forward that gives an additional point of reference uh but also combines with your hand tracking model um for uh for uh for visibility and because of the new placement of the cameras on the quest 3 uh there's actually pretty good tracking volume in the lower area and even behind uh maybe like a little bit past 180 degrees uh past where your arms would go so if you're doing a bow and arrow application didn't find any problems with the quest uh Quest 3 controller is kind of near my ear behind my ear here once you move to kind of further and twist your arm behind your back you can see in the ik model uh it's compensating with that ik and it starts jumping around a little bit there's also a few dead zones one right beneath your chin and also a dead zone kind of right above where your forehead is because there are no cameras above the headset the cameras are in the front and the bottom so once you move the controllers above your head a little bit I don't know for you know maybe your beat saer could uh your handles up there uh you get rotational motion you get a little bit of prediction uh when with the ik model but quickly that it starts jumping around and um as a trade-off they decide to make I found it acceptable and even though the quest Pro controllers can pair with the quest 3 for kind of your perfect Inside Out track controllers I find found myself really happy with the responsiveness and the accuracy of the touch plus uh something was also unique to the touch plus controllers is because it's tracking your hand and the controllers of the same time there's also uh what's they call hybrid input so when you have your hands and you have maybe the direct touch interface that is you have your menu really close and you can kind of move the menus around by pinching them and you can actually Point your virtual finger into the menu and get the illusion of touching a button which I find pretty good for using the virtual keyboard you can actually do that with your finger while holding the touch controller something you couldn't do with the Plus or the the The Quest 2 you couldn't do with the pro and you still can't do currently with the pro even if you pair the pro with the quest 3 another advantage of the touch plus controllers uh it comes with two AA batteries so you're back to replaceable batteries which I know a lot of people like actually one thing I liked is the battery compartment really easily removes uh and you can remove the lanyard as well because they sell this aftermarket accessory uh for basically uh your Fitness grips they call them and uh while there are rechargeable batteries they sell with their dock I found battery life on these new controllers to be just as impressive as with the Quest 2 one of the big surprises with the Quest 2 was how long a single daa battery could last here even though there is a rechargeable battery with the dock they sent to me I've been keeping the ablea battery here for most of this testing and with the four dot battery indicator it hasn't even dropped a single dot it's still basically between 75% and 100% capacity even after a full week and a half of pretty intense use so very happy there uh with fewer tracking lights on here I did have a chance at meta connect to ask one of the developers one of the quest 3 team members whether you would actually get bettery battery better battery life uh on a touch controller but they said it's basically the same battery life uh haix wise it is also an huge improvement over the Quest 2 controllers over those first touch controllers uh now there's a vcm motor that's a voice control voice coil motor um system right here in the grip and that basically is a speaker system so using their haptic Studio developers can generate uh not only the frequency but the amplitude of these these customized haptics and they feel really good on these kind of subtle vibrations almost tonal vibrations that you get on the vcm haptics here you lose the linear actuators the uh L uh haptics on the thumb and the trigger that you got on the quest Pro controllers um and that's a curious decision I get why you don't get the thumb lras cuz you're not using the the pinch mechanism as much uh but these controllers are supposed to actually be two-stage so uh while the analog the throw here doesn't activate as a two-stage button press uh there you do theoretically get an extra press in the sensor uh that games can take advantage of and I felt like that would have been a great way to take advantage of having a linear actuator to give you that haptic feedback but that's not here on the touch uh touch plus and even though for the vast majority of games I was using the controller actually found myself really happy also with the hand tracking and this is one of those instances where if you are coming from a quest to you've seen the improvements in the hand tracking software with their hand tracking 2.0 with the direct touch uh new interface all that is inherited here and uh with mixed reality being a more viable option and more comfortable uh with a sharp resolution screen I found myself using the hand controls to manipulate the web browser the virtual keyboard and the home application a lot more uh I actually really like using that direct touch input again you don't get real haptics when you're pushing your finger through a virtual screen uh but everything they've done to give you this as much visual feedback and even audio feedback of you interacting with that screen I think psychologically it feels really good uh interacting with this screen that's just floating in front of me using my hands even though I don't get any actual real haptic feedback something to look forward to with their hand tracking though that they announced em connect is going to be the addition of micro gestures so this feels like a little bit of a response to what Apple showed with the Vision Pro uh they have you know their very basic small Taps as a way to interact with their menus combined with eye tracking no ey tracking here but I could see these micro jaures microts being a less taxing way to use hand tracking and hand trck interfaces uh on the quest family of devices so looking forward to trying that out as well one place where the quest 3 feels like it is a generational leap over the Quest 2 and even the quest Pro started to say is in its processing power it's using qualcom Snapdragon xr2 Gen 2 processor so mou full because you had the Qualcomm Snapdragon xr2 you had the Qualcomm Snapdragon xr2 plus which was uh better thermal management uh increased memory um so you you have to you can have higher you didn't have to throttle the clock speeds as much uh but here it is a generational leap in terms of being a whole new process it's a 4 nanometer process processor which means higher clock speeds less heat and much faster GPU which is where the big story is here for rendering power with its new GPU it is up to not only 2 times as fast it's actually up to 2.6 times as fast the processing speed as the quest Pro and Quest 2 uh developers can choose a balance between CPU and GPU s if they want more CPU uh priority then you get basically a 2X performance in GPU if you want more GPU priority a 2.6x and if you run mix reality mixed reality takes that basically a 15% compute off the top to run mixed reality although you're rendering I guess less virtual scenes so that might all even out with that extra Graphics power developer can not only do things like super sampling hit that new render Target but they can choose you know more post-processing effects better Shadows Dynamic lighting high resolution textures the memory bandwidth here is increased and basically what that means is at the bare minimum when developers update their games you're going to get higher resolution higher resolution with better anti-aliasing better uh texture filtering and just sharper Graphics overall unfortunately that doesn't come right out of the box applications developers uh will have to update their apps to meet those new rendering targets if you run an unupdated Quest 2 application which I tried a bunch of here while every application is fully Backward Compatible uh it does look low resolution I mean not only do textures look lower resolution but you can tell the render targets are lower and it doesn't automatically get better anti-aliasing so things just look more dithered um so can't wait for more games to actually enable that and take advantage of of that extra processing power the render buffer like I said at the top is 1680 by 1760 it's lower than the native resolution of these panels and so everywhere every place where a developer can enable better super sampling better anti-aliasing that's going to be noticeable in this headset I was I would got to say I was maybe I was wishing that the graphics would be more impressive on some of the updates so red matter 2 is a great example where the updates only that they've done updates not only on the quest Pro side to take advantage of fiated rendering but they've also very quickly updated Quest 3 version to look as close to the PC version of the game as possible and while the effects the textures do look great uh it doesn't feel as good as pcvr I'm still missing you know your halflife Alex quality Graphics if you're going to play a racing SIM for example uh you're still going to get far better graphics uh even on equivalent games so Dei population one I still preferred playing the PC VR version of that streamed over virtual desktop streamed over Lincoln air link than I did the Native version on this headset even with graphical updates and with no games announc being exclusive to the quest 3 so asgard's wrath 2 will play on The Quest 2 Assassin's Creed Nexus just as well on the Quest 2 uh the benefits here are just going to be Clarity textures uh some effects and I am really looking forward to a time when developers will be completely unfeathered and and feathered to create something that only the quest 3 can run to really maximize what the graphics look like on this new chipset uh but the chipset won't matter as much if you're doing pcvr and I'm happy to say pcvr games look fantastic here in the quest 3 uh I did some virtual desktop streaming that got recently updated so you can update your bit rate all the way to 200 megabits per second uh your desktop looks great even though you're locked to One desktop at 1920 by 1280 uh but link and air link also look fantastic in here and if you go into your debug settings and bump up that bit rate to 300 megabits per second or you up to 500 megabits per second on a Link cable basically see almost no compression I won't say compression isn't there I still to my eye I can tell when the graphics are natively rendered rendered versus being streamed and compressed uh but a game like halflife Alex which still seems like the high bar in terms of texture detail you're going to see all those details much more detail on this headset than I did on the quest Pro in terms of looking at your Russell gloves or even the textures on your handheld weapons and accessories in in game things look so good uh one place where I did miss the quest Pro and Native pcvr headsets was the contrast level the Black Level the dark Grays on here instead of the blacks did I think make compression more noticeable when you're running at you know 50 or 100 megabits per second and while the quest 3 also has Wi-Fi 6E support so I did have a dedicated router setup for 6E uh I did have a little bit of network issues using a virtual desktop at 200 megabits per second got some bit of latency in the network uh an airlink no problems at 200 megabits per second or even 300 megabits per second at this point with uh Wi-Fi 60 router still being pretty expensive I think if you're on an uncongested Network you're going to get just fine of a wireless streaming experience with a 5 GHz ban 6 GHz ban it could be an upgrade path down the line once the compression algorithms get uh get better or if for example you're using an Nvidia 4000 series graphics card which I don't have which has av1 encoding the quest 3 and virtual desktop does do av1 decoding as well if you have the hardware now with the thermal improvements on the 4 nanometer process on the new s so here what one of the things the engineers could have done with quester was give it a longer battery life uh but battery life here is basically the same as with the previous headsets it's between two and two and a half hours closer to two hours in my experience when playing games two and a half if I'm streaming video or streaming from PC VR uh and so I expect a lot of people uh tethering their own battery packs and creating battery mounts uh to extend the battery life for long duration play especially if you're using pcvr and doing long you know Elite dangerous simulation uh game gameplay sessions uh there will be an elite battery uh Elite headst strap with battery which I didn't get a chance to test uh which will add additional hour or two of battery life uh but one thing to note with that new Elite headstrap with battery design is they change it up so here is the elite headp with battery which plugs into the Quest 2 uh and it has a charging port in the back that's how I plug this into the anchor charging dock uh the new Elite headstrap with battery removes that USB charging port which I think was a calculated decision to get people to try to buy their charging dock now you can charge that headstrap by plugging the USB port into a wall wart or into a battery pack but there's no way to get basically pass through Power on the headset while you're using the elite headstrap with battery and you have to charge that that when it's plugged in by plugging it into their charging dock which I think is a step backwards in terms of design not very consumer friendly uh also maybe not so consumer friendly is the price of this charging dock it's $130 while it does do you know basically contactless charging for the headset with those three contact points as well as inductive charging on these touch plus controllers with the battery that you put in here uh the battery itself is less than the battery life of a able a you see these lights turning on so I think as a design it's better than the charging dock that came with the quest Pro which was fiddly in terms of these magnetic attachments and getting those controllers to perfectly lock into place uh one thing that I think is just unacceptable is that the charging dock here does not include the cable and wallwart you're actually using the 18w power connector and wallwart that came with the headset on this charging dock even though this supports up to 27 watts and 45 watts of charging and where would you get a 45 watt meta charger well that's the one that comes with the quest Pro so that's something for 130 bucks they should have absolutely included with their charging dock I am it's I'm I'm H I'm happppy that they nickel and Diamond users here say don't buy this accessory another place where it feels like they made a decision to not put the best they could have in the quest 3 uh is in the ram so this has 8 gigs of RAM up from 6 gigs on the Quest 2 but not as high as the 12 gigs on the quest Pro and RAM prices as I understand it pretty cheap these days and there's no kind of uh passive power draw going from 8 gigs to 12 gigs at least not in a meaningful way uh they're saying that developers have still the same 5.7 gigs of uh access to memory uh between the quest Pro and the quest 3 so it's not like Quest Pro applications will have access to more and and and and you can do more within an application it's going to be more in the multitasking capabilities of the quest 3 so this is some place where I feel like there's a Miss opportunity and I get that this is mostly maybe a primarily a gaming headset with mixed reality features and the pro is supposed to be your productivity but the pro I felt like has been pretty underserved from both meta as well as the developer space in the where those productivity apps one of the places I feel like I enjoy the most in the quest 3 is using the native home screen applications these Progressive web apps that they announc two years ago I think in 2021 so things like the web browser and you know your explore page and the the friends list I love running multiple web browsers love running multiple web browsers in the quest Pro and I really like using them in the quest 3 especially with the hand track and the resolution having YouTube having Google Docs having a third browser for Reddit all of that feels super usable in the quest 3 um I feel like that is a very viable alternative to having even a laptop open at an airport I can see people using Bluetooth key uh keyboards with a headset in a private working space I've been using that in my you know public my uh living areas uh the kitchen the dining room table just wearing a headset using a a keyboard which doesn't even need to be tracked now because pass through is good enough for me to see my fingers and to see the keys and browsing the web using Google Sheets using Google doc uh that all feels like there's untapped potential and the fact that there aren't more of these Progressive web apps native applications like slack Discord Spotify things that were promised you know months and months ago feels like a huge Miss opportunity this past year of the quest Pro having that 12 gigs of RAM and meta should have pushed for more developers to make these native Progressive web apps so that Quest 3 users could take advantage of that and it feels like just a huge missed opportunity right now especially since the number of mixed mixed reality applications at launch seem a little bit underwhelming uh games that supported mixed reality previously things like cubism deio uh with the better pass two cameras absolutely look great it's my preferred way of using those applications rather than a rendered background I don't look at my you know virtual home screen anymore my home screen is the pass through mixed reality view but other than you know things like figment XR they meta first encounters n demo application not a ton to do at launch with mixed reality and so the strengths of this for me are you know the Improv rendering resolution for for games that you maybe already own and games that are coming out one of the best things I saw one of the best looking games I saw at metac connect was the Lego brick Tails Port that's coming over in December that looked like PC VR Graphics but with pass through mixed reality as the background I can't wait to play and see those little Lego diarama scenes uh in the quest 3 when that comes out um it's going to be a massive upgrade for Quest 2 it does feel like a generational leap for owners of The Quest 2 for the clarity of the Optics increase render resolution the ergonomics the Comfort uh all of that and the processing power feels well worth it especially if you can support your entire back catalog of games you've already purchased on the Quest 2 minus the ones they've discontinued like uh like Echo Arena um and for the quest Pro I mean I feel for everyone who bought into Quest I mean I definitely feel for those who adopted it last year at $1,500 people who bought it for $1,000 it's a tough call I've been this is the thing I've been struggling with most this past week is going back between these two headsets and I'm going to end up saying if you use the quest Pro as a PC VR device I think you're probably going to still be very happy and maybe even happier with the quest Pro over the quest 3 as a pcvr device because of the black levels because of local dimming on the quest Pro headset you're not going to miss that extra field of view or render resolution if you're already doing super sampling on your pcvr side uh and happy with that if you are using a quest Pro headset primarily for mixed reality for web browsing for those Progressive web apps whatever is available uh for virtual desktop uh you might want to use the I think the quest three would be a worthwhile I wouldn't say addition but a tradein if you can offload your quest Pro and that's where I really wish meta offered a tradeing program you know not only for Quest true to you know pay enough charge and upgrades to the quest 3 but it would make a lot of sense I think you know uh for someone to trade in quest Pro if you could trade it for like a 512 gig Quest 3 model or a 128 gig model with the elite headst strap I think that would be absolutely a fair trade and for $500 which I know is $200 more than what the Quest 2 launched at I think that's a pretty fair price for what you're getting here not only with the displays but also for the extra processing power and the ergonomic Comfort uh that the the pancake lenses afford you're going to be able to spend more time in VR if you enjoy VR here if you're going if you use VR for productivity if you use it for work you're going to get way more mileage out of this headset uh between the 128 and the 512 gigabyte models I think the 128 gig is totally fine especially with most applications being cross-compatible if you have a fast internet connection uh you can easily you know delete and download new applications 128 gigs is perfectly fine if even if you're SE a s side loading movies on tier or I what I do is you just stream movies off your now server using uh using something like a a Skybox VR or or uh using um or using virtual desktop um the essential upgrade I would say is some type of third party headstrap or some type of extra headstrap whether it's the elite headstrap or you know Bobo VR it may come out with uh and I think you could probably skip the charging dock and the carrying case I think those are probably inessential uh if you wear glasses I don't think you need those any Optical inserts I was really happy with wearing my glasses in here that was one of the nice surprises of the headset uh and so to get a I think a great experience with this probably you're talking about that $560 plus tax if you include that Elite headstrap so that's my in-depth review of The Quest 3 um in many ways better than I expected in many ways uh still a headset with a lot more potential to unlock depth API with more mixed reality experiences I don't think it fulfills the mixed reality promise that we all are hoping for or that even the hardware can provide just yet uh but it is I think fair to say a generational leap um Over The Quest 2 and a an interesting comparison with The Quest Pro uh my recommendation for pcvr users Quest Pro big screen VR whatever valve may be working on is it also worth considering um so you may want to hold off on the headset until then uh but if you're locked into the quest ecosystem with a ton of applications and love tetherless VR and and you're going to get a lot out of the quest 3 if you have additional questions things I didn't address please post them in the comments below thank you so much for watching as always I'm Norm from tested and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Adam Savage’s Tested

Views: 255,997

Keywords: tested, meta quest 3, quest 3, virtual reality, meta quest, quest 2, mixed reality, oculus quest 2, quest 3 release date, meta quest 2, quest 3 hands on, meta quest 3 review, meta quest 3 news, oculus quest, vr headset, quest pro, meta quest 3 vs oculus quest 2, meta quest 3 release date, augmented reality, oculus quest 3, virtual reality games, meta quest 3 price, quest 3 specs, quest 3 review, quest 3 leaks, vr gaming, quest 3 hands, meta quest 3 hands on, unboxing

Id: xCzP7uKwzSM

Length: 55min 32sec (3332 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 09 2023