A hands-on look at Meta Quest 3 reveals a large set of improvements to the Meta mixed reality headset, as detailed in Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter for Bloomberg this morning. Gurman says the Quest 3, now codenamed Eureka, is “lighter and thinner” than the original Quest 2, which is good for its comfort during long-term use.
In February, Meta VR exec Mark Rabkin told employees that Quest 3 was more expensive than its predecessor and that “We have to prove to people that all this power, all these new part worth it.” He said Meta has sold 20 million Quest headsets so far.
He also looked at the lighter design, explaining that “The main north star for the team from the moment you put on this headset, mixed reality should feel better, easier , more natural … You can walk effortlessly through your house knowing that you can see perfectly well. You can put anchors and objects on your desktop. You can take your coffee. You can stay there and longer.”
The report confirms some of the other major improvements we’ve come to expect, such as a second-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip, with better overall performance as a result.
The report also talks about what Quest 3 is not there is, in other words, eye tracking. That means games can’t use foveated rendering, a feature Sony’s PSVR 2 has that adjusts based on where a player is looking and allows the system to concentrate processing power on graphics. in areas and return to other areas.
Design upgrades from the Quest 2 include more sensors inside three pill-shaped areas with four cameras, two of which are color cameras for passthrough video. It also features an improved system for adjusting the inter-pupillary distance of the lenses – the distance between your eyes – with a wheel that you can turn while wearing them instead of taking them off. headset and switch the display manually.
A depth sensor in the middle of the device could improve AR performance compared to the Quest Pro’s camera-only approach. The redesigned controllers do away with the rings on the Quest 2, but the depth sensor may help keep costs down by tracking the controller’s position without the need for cameras like the Quest Pro controllers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually said that the Quest Pro will get a depth sensor in a Protocol interview, but the segment did not make it to the final version.
Gurman called the pass-through video “almost life-like,” a good sign after my colleague Adi Robertson called the AR mode “murky in low light, washed-out or flickering in bright light, and sometimes luridly saturated in between” in his review of Search Pro.
It looks like the improvements there are mainly in how the headset’s cameras handle light and color, as Gurman doesn’t think they’ll be any sharper, despite rumors of a higher resolution display. resolution.