META QUEST 3: The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly

it's finally here almost exactly 3 years after the launch of the Quest 2 the successor has arrived this is the quest 3 packed with a new processor higher resolutions smaller form factor new controllers new price it's an entirely new headset and after using it non-stop since the moment it arrived I've got some interesting thoughts on it most of it's good like actually really good but there are a few decisions that were made that I just find kind of baffling and we'll get to that so let's just start from the [Music] top okay so I've only had this headset for a couple of days so this video is my Impressions not a full review I usually don't do a full headset review until I have at least a few hundred hours of usage so that'll come later also I did buy this headset myself surprisingly meta did actually send a headset for review but it arrived at the exact same time as my purchased headset on launch day so I'll just be giving the meta headset away to my community and I'll give details on that later and even though this is an Impressions video I do go pretty deep and I was able to test quite a few things from fov to Clarity Comfort individual game performance pcvr usage Bluetooth compatibility the whole nine yards so we'll get to everything all the good all the bad and all the ugly so let's start with the basics before we get into the good and bad of the headset the quest 3 comes in two variants the Baseline 128 GB version for $499 and the 512 GB version for a whopping 650 and we'll definitely talk about price of it later but I personally ordered the 512 GB version mostly because I was already running out of storage space on my quest Pro which is 256 GB so it made sense to opt for the larger version even if it costs more and inside the Box you get two controllers the headset and a charging cable and Brake and that's about it and I think I'll just start with the controllers and really just hats off to meta these are the best controllers they've ever made I was a huge fan of their previous touch Pro controllers that track themselves but the quest 3 controllers combine The Best of Both Worlds taking the design of Touch Pros and matching it with the quest 2's color scheme and while the build materials are still a lot nicer on the pro controllers at just about half the weight i' take these new controllers any day moving on to the headset the first thing that I notice is just how dense the quest 3 is while being very slightly heavier than the Quest 2 meta says it's 40% % thinner which is totally true if you just count the headset itself but that's kind of like weighing the headset without the battery when you take into consideration how far the headset actually rests off the front of your head it's really only about 15 to 20% thinner which is only slightly thinner than the pico4 but hey I'll take it and on the headset you have a slew of buttons and ports a USBC Port headphone jack charging pins volume rocker power switch and two new additions that I'm very happy about first off full range manual ipd adjustment is back using this dial you have a range of 58 to 71 mm so no more of the Quest 2 three-stage notches and now in the quest 3 you have an eye relief adjustment which is awesome it's in a bit of a weird place inside of the headset on the facial interface there's a button you could use to extend or retract the length of the face foam essentially bringing your eyes closer to or further from the lenses like I said the implementation's a little finicky but it does work and then in case anyone was ever curious or confused as to which headset is the quest 3 well it literally says it on the front these three black capsules house two tracking cameras and two 4 megapixel RGB pass through cameras the middle capsule however bring something I've been waiting for for a long time a depth sensor something that's pretty crucial to the entire Quest 3 system especially in the future flip the headset around and on the inside you've got two beautiful pancake lenses that look a lot like the quest Pro lenses actually and in terms of build quality meta did really really well the Quest 2 was an absolute brick I mean in the off chance you ever accidentally left your headset in the dryer it would survive just fine and I'm happy to say the quest 3 is also a brick okay so now that the basic information is out of the way let's actually get into the good and the bad and we'll just start with a good the first thing you'll notice when you put on this headset are the lenses the quest pro has some of the best lenses out of any VR headset ever and the quest 3 has basically the same ones in fact they're so good that I don't really have much to say about them just know that Quest 3 has best-in-class lenses great clarity little to no visual artifacts like Distortion lens flares God rays and they have a huge sweet spot with great edgo Edge Clarity if I were to take one thing that is the biggest noticeable Improvement between the Quest 2 and three this would be it and since we're on the optic stack it's a perfect time to talk about the displays and field of view gone is the single display of the original Quest 2 the quest 3 now has two LCD panels capable of up to 120 HZ refresh rate which is huge meta advertises a 30% resolution increase going from 1832 by 1920 per I to now 2064 by 2208 per I but in reality it's actually an even better increase than that since the Quest 2 single panel literally wasted pixels because it was a single display and in terms of clarity at least on pcvr where you can actually use the full resolution I'd say it's just below Reverb G2 Clarity of course with the added compression that you get through link or virtual desktop but regardless there's practically no perceivable screen door effect but there's also a noticeably wider field of view I personally got a horizontal field of view of 108° at the Titus eye relief still not as wide as the index but it's around the same fov as the quest Pro and about 10% wider than the Quest 2 it's a very very welcomed Improvement obviously not human Vision fov it's still a modern VR headset but I'll take what I can get I should also say that the built-in headstrap speakers are significantly better and louder than the quest 2os I've been using them a lot and I actually like them there's a pretty decent base to them but one of the biggest upgrades has to be this new chipset now packing the Qualcomm xr2 Gen 2 and it's pretty good at least from what I've seen of it to be honest in most games you really can't tell because it hasn't been updated or Changed by the developers there aren't many things that do take advantage of it yet which is kind of weird but when there is a game that actually uses the horsepower it's nice if I could put it in a single way the way it fuels the graphics difference it's like setting the graphics preset from low to medium but I think more importantly in all the existing Quest 2 games that you have full access to with the quest 3 whether they take advantage of the Gen 2 graphically or not the performance is noticeably better I do got to say though the biggest example of better performance with the quest 3 has to be with the most taxing VR game on the quest store which is VR chat you can really see and feel the difference it feels like a huge upgrade on Quest 2 in large public lobbies the frame rate can frequently dip below 15 FPS even and in those same situations with the quest 3 I was getting at least 15 to 30 more frames and I know 40 FPS may not sound like a lot but going from 12 fps to 35 FPS in VR chat is pretty huge on the PC side of VR chat some people spend thousands of dollars just to get 30 more frames so yeah but I think the biggest thing I noticed across the board whether VR chat or any other game is that there were just significantly less frame dips and this goes for the operating system as well at this point the Quest 2 has the same feeling as using an old phone with a modern operating system it's just a little slow and hangs every now and then the three on the other hand has that Snappy new phone feeling that you'd expect but on to tracking quality I was really impressed it's great and we still have to wait for the Beat saer Bros to really test it out but at least at my skill level the tracking quality was good enough the typical camera tracked blind spots are still there basically under the chin way above your head and behind your back you'll lose tracking in those spots but that's nothing new and I think I think what I was most impressed by was the low light tracking quality in an entirely dark room with only a projector running I was getting perfectly good tracking which is awesome it was pretty dark and of course hand tracking has improved substantially it's something I use all the time but that's it for the good as you can see there's a lot of it this is a pretty sick headset but it's not perfect and here's where things start taking just a slight turn for the worse now I'm going to start with the least bad and progress into the terrible and I'm sure a lot of this stuff is going to be fixed at some point meta is pretty good about updates but this is how it shipped I'll start with the guardian system because of the depth sensor there's actually no need to make a guardian anymore which is awesome it does it by itself and I love the feature but the state it's in currently feels really half-baked sometimes it feels like I'm setting up a guardian every time I put on the headset sometimes multiple times in a play session and this isn't just in one lighting scenario this is in multiple it also doesn't take advantage of the depth sensor to automatically add couches or tables to your play Space you have to manually add geometry like you did on the Quest 2 and pro which doesn't really save all that much time this is one thing I'm almost certain will be updated in the future and at this point it's more of a nitpick but next is the mixed reality look I'm not going to try to tell you that mixed reality is great right now because it's just not it's Leaps and Bounds ahead of the Quest 2 and it's a couple steps ahead of the quest Pro both in terms of picture quality and depth accuracy but it's still quite grainy and it almost makes me a little nauseous with the warping and wobbling that happens when looking at my hands or a phone on top of that there's really not much right now that takes advantage of mixed reality a few highlights are figman cubism piano vision and there's a few decent ones on the way but mixed reality as a feature at least right now on Quest 3 feels like it's in a tech demo stage which is totally fine but if you're going to sell a headset with this massive feature I would have expected some sort of killer app for it all that being said the pass through is really great for in between VR sessions or taking a peek at things I use it all all the time and surprisingly I'm able to check the time on my watch and sort of do things on my phone it's still really wobbly but if you're about 18 in away you can read a phone for the most part but if you're expecting something mind-blowing it's not here yet I think it will be and this is another thing I'm confident we'll see frequent updates on in typical meta fashion where things get better over time and I do think this will improve the camera resolution is there it just needs some work but now on to things that can't just be fixed through a patch starting with the displays the quest 3 still uses LCD panels so expect LCD like qualities everything's clear but everything's gray I especially noticed this when playing dungeons of Eternity great game by the way I highly recommend but the dark sections just didn't feel very immersive it's a big part of the game and I felt like I was missing something and believe me I know I am certainly just spoiled by the Beyond black levels but after seeing local dimming on the quest Pro look so good and honestly the price not being that much different I was hopeful but here we are LCD again at least for another cycle battery life was also pretty mid I timed a game session from full charge to dead and I got 1 hour and 55 minutes your time will vary based on game choice and especially vary based on pass through if you've got pass through and depth sensor going on all the time you're going to get less than that and of course we got to talk about the microphone here's what the microphone sounds like on the quest three I don't know how it somehow got worse than the Quest 2 but here we are and it's a real shame of course you can add an external microphone but you shouldn't have to it's just adding more things that you have to charge and throw on a headset and adding cost it's just a little crazy to me that meta Engineers can make something like this that's so Advanced but miss the details of communication I thought that was their whole thing social network and another nitpick is that even with the New xr2 Gen 2 Bluetooth audio latency is still unusable so no airpods or other wireless headphones you'll have to use the low latency Bluetooth dongles that we'd had to use with the Quest 2 but now we can get to the terrible and stay with me for a moment I'm just going to go on a tiny rant but this was my personal experience the quest 3 is the first headset that is actually kind of painful for me out of the box at first when I put on the headset it felt fine for an hour or so but once you start actually moving things go south pretty quick there's a lot of pressure on the forehead and if you loosen it up to alleviate that well the headset will just bang into your nose when you turn your head but I think the worst part of the Comfort on this headset is that on anything less than the maxed out eye relief setting so all the way pulled out my eyebrows are smashed into the inside of the headset and it's legit painful like I have eyebrow bruises from trying to tough it out and look everyone's face is different I know I got a giga forehead and the androl eyebrows and if you don't have that your experience may vary and to get the headset comfortable with my head in the current state it's at there's a massive downside if you slide the eye relief all the way open like I said all the way back so your eyes are far away from the lenses the field of view shrinks all the way down to 90° 90 oh man and you know of course just like everyone says every single one of these problems goes away if you just buy an elite or Bobo strap and I also found a way to fix this problem for totally free by the way here's a tip just take a hat throw it on backwards and throw the quest three on top and cinch it down you'll thank me later the pain goes away and you could actually use the full field of view but I guess this just kind of makes me feel weird you ously almost everyone says the same thing forehead strain depressed my ear digs into your ears here and here I found it it's just not very comfortable when playing for hours at a time but it's perfect if you spend an extra 70 to $130 on the upgraded headstrap and to be real I think that we've all just gotten so used to fixing the Quest 2 for the past 3 years that when we hear that the quest 3 is uncomfortable out of the box it's not even surprising it's just expected that you'll have to spend more money to fix it and upgrade the strap which wasn't really that big of a problem for the Quest 2 it was $300 that's pretty cheap the only problem is that this time the quest isn't $300 it's $500 and I do think it's worth $500 but it's hard not to wice when the price goes up while basic things like Comfort are tacked on at the end as an extra premium so it just my final Impressions I still have a lot of testing to do before I hit final conclusions I want to test for myself just how much more powerful the xr2 Gen 2 is in application I want to see what updates come that unlock more of the quest 3 to differentiate itself from the two and I need to see what the upcoming games actually look like we got Assassin's Creed Nexus coming and asgard's wrath 2 and apparently 100 games are getting Quest 3 improvements sometime this year and as of now I can say that the quest 3 is a pretty massive incremental upgrade Over The Quest 2 I'm using it over my quest Pro and right now my setup is basically beyond for PC VR and Quest 3 for everything else else and with the quest 3 a lot of VR feels pretty fresh and exciting again everything looks nice and clean it's a huge Improvement for Standalone VR and I got to say meta has made a really fantastic headset PC VR is great virtual desktop on God mode is fantastic the xr2 Gen 2 in game performance is better than it's ever been pass through is fun and actually usable and there's a bright future for mixed reality that we honestly haven't even touched yet and yes there are some real disappointing nitpicks that maybe deal breakers for some and I do think the Comfort situation is concerning and the problem could very well just be my facial structure who knows but in terms of recommendations if it's your first time getting into VR this is probably the best first headset there's ever been as long as you got like $600 to blow it's also the best VR you can get without a big gaming PC and you can also just plug right into one just whatever you do please don't waste your money on one of those color straps but at the same time the Quest 2 still is the best best hyper budget option in VR there's going to be a lot of people flexing their Quest 3 saying the Quest 2 sucks but it is in no way irrelevant I mean probably for the next year you can play all the same games the quest 3 users can and if you just want a cheap way to get into VR you can get one for around 150 bucks which is crazy and in terms of people upgrading from The Quest 2 or Rift or Vive from one VR fanatic with a sore wallet to another if you already use VR a lot or you love VR and other headsets just didn't quite cut it for you I think you're probably going to love it I know I'm fallen for it and it's an awesome headset once you spend the cash and get the Comfort down but it is worth remembering meta dropped the price of the quest Pro by 33% just a few months after its launch and I'm still feeling that I bought that headset day one so if you are the patient type and you don't have a whole burning in your pocket and maybe you already have a Quest 2 for example it just might be worth holding out until there's something something that really catches your eye or until the pricing just makes a little more sense like I said if you're on Quest 2 you're not really missing that much but the hardware experience is a lot better so that's up to you all right and that's it I hope you guys enjoyed my quest 3 Impressions video I tried to cover everything I could I've been using this headset every single minute I think I've barely slept in the past 2 days and like I said I will be giving away the quest 3 that was sent to one of you guys on a twitch stream it's not going to be in the comments so don't fall for that and that's going to happen in the next few weeks I'll have updates on it in my Discord server so join in there and I wanted to say thank you to my patreon supporters you guys are legitimately the ones that made this video possible I couldn't do this sort of independent coverage without you guys so until next time don't forget to like this video if you loved it subscribe if you want more of this and hit that freaking Bell if you just can't live without it much love thrill out

Channel: ThrillSeeker

Views: 657,994

Keywords: VR, virtual reality, quest 3, Meta quest 3, Quest 2, Quest 3 review, Quest 3 headset, Quest 2 review, VR review, Thrillseeker, Tuesday Newsday, Best VR, Valve INdex, VRchat, beatsaber, Gorilla Tag, Quest, Meta Quest, Oculus Quest, Oculus Quest 3

Id: dejZCWYCdSI

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023