The New Meta Quest 3: Status and Early Expectations of a High-Performance Augmented Reality Gesture in the X-ray Sector
The new Meta Quest 3 is lighter and slimmer and has more memory than the Meta Quest 2—all of the things you’d expect from a “new,” updated gadget. It’s running on Snapdragon’s XR2 Gen 2 chipset, which affords it better graphics performance.
We can’t say for sure how it will do outside a highlycurated demo space, but we will let you know once we have fully tested it. Check out our first impressions and place a pre-order for the upcoming headset as soon as possible.
The official announcement does fill out the device’s spec sheet in a big way. The Quest 3 is powered by the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor and 8GB of RAM, which Meta says doubles the graphics performance over the Quest 2 and should also be substantially better than even the Quest Pro, which runs the last-gen XR2 chip. The cheapest version of Quest 3 has 128 gigabytes of internal storage and costs $649.99. Meta says the battery life is “about the same as Quest 2,” which means somewhere between 90 minutes and three hours, depending on what you’re doing.
The most important hardware difference is the cameras: two new full-color cameras on the front of the headset deliver vastly improved passthrough video. According toQualcomm, its vision pro has average passthrough time of just 12 milliseconds, similar to Apple’s Vision Pro, but hedged that it depends on the image resolution it is trying to pass through. You can choose to use the Quest 3 in a fully immersive virtual reality mode or in a blended version that lets you see both your real-world surroundings and the content you are looking at.
This is a small step in the correct direction, but not full holographic augmented reality. To switch between modes, you can use the controller or just tap two of your fingers together twice; this double-tap gesture is also core to the Vision Pro and seems to be the agreed-upon way to operate a headset.
The Quest 3: The Future is Making Sense of the Digital World: Mark Zuckerberg and the new Ray-Ban Smart Glasses and Quest Connect
The headset is a little larger and heavier than the previous model, but it is still relatively small. Meta says it’s been redesigned to be more comfortable to wear, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
The Quest 3’s Touch Plus controllers, as expected, do away with the large tracking ring in favor of infrared sensors that track your position. They also have improved haptics, so you should be able to get more visceral vibrations as you play games — and, of course, the Quest 3 supports hand tracking, so you can ditch the controllers entirely if you so desire.
Today Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed full details about two new hardware products: an updated virtual reality Quest headset and a new set of Meta-powered smart glasses made by Ray-Ban. The company began its annual Meta Connect conference with the announcements.
Zuckerberg, in his keynote address, emphasized that he believes the future of computing is a fully melded, physical-digital world. He also called the Quest 3 the industry’s first “mainstream reality headset.”
The physical world around us is amazing. He said that being able to go outside is one of the joys of life. The industry has been building up the digital world. People say, ‘The digital world isn’t the real world,’ but we really think the real world is a combination of the physical world we inhabit and the digital world we’re building.”