Meta Quest 3
While reviewing the Meta Quest 3, I aggressively dropped various components of the virtual reality headset. Not once, but twice.
First, I attempted to relocate the official wireless charging stand, with headset and Touch Plus controllers in tow (huge mistake). While changing locations, the headset slid out of its smooth cradle and slammed onto my desk—hard—scratching the front plastic panel in the process. I cursed, loudly. The scratch remained. But so did I. So did I.
The second drop occurred when I, not having learned from the first blunder, attempted to move the charging stand with headset and controllers in tow (yet again). This time, a controller energetically jumped out of its holder like it was training for the Olympics and proceeded to bounce down a flight of stairs in the most comical Looney Toons fashion imaginable. I cursed, now even more loudly.
Despite these mishaps, everything still works. Praise be. Under His eye.
Why am I telling you this? Well, it’s a funny story, man. But also, if you buy the aforementioned stylish $130 charging stand, take your hardware out of the no-grip pedestals before relocating. Lastly, it’s a testament to the ruggedness of Meta’s hardware, and to my own resilience in the face of tech adversity, obviously. This isn’t a review, it’s a story of hope. Are you ready for this article to change your life? I’m certainly not.
Offset
So the 512GB Meta Quest 3, the sleeker and more powerful successor to 2020’s Meta Quest 2, currently retails for $499.99, and if you buy one now, you get a copy of the rather compelling Batman: Arkham Shadow game, as well as three months of Meta+, a rotating subscription service similar to those found on PlayStation and Xbox. You can kind of compare the Quest 3 to PSVR2, which requires a PS5 to run and retails for $549.99, and the Meta Quest 3S (a budget Meta Quest 3, essentially, or a souped-up Quest 2) is priced at $299.99. The immediate advantage to Meta Quest 3 over something like PSVR2 is its standalone, freeform nature. No cords, no mess, no base station to worry about.
Basically, you don’t need additional hardware to run the Quest 3; you simply charge it up and slap it on your beautiful, greasy head. All the processing is handled internally by its onboard Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chipset, and naturally, this does limit the Quest 3’s graphical prowess to that of a comparable mobile device. Unless you’re tethering it to a beastly PC, that is.
I wasn’t sent a Link Cable for my review, and therefore couldn’t test this specific feature, sadly. But I don’t need direct experience to know these kinds of things, because I have what you might call Big Brain Power. Using the Quest 3 in tandem with a formidable gaming rig is definitely of interest for future articles, though, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
The hardware itself looks great, plus it’s thinner and more manageable than the Meta Quest 2, and boasts higher quality pancake lenses. Although, the front visor cameras have evolved, mostly to allow for improved color passthrough and some excellent mixed reality experiences.
You’d already know this if you watched Meta’s recent Hidden Dimensions limited online series, which features a bunch of famous people I’m utterly unfamiliar with using the headset in various lifestyle ways. I don’t put much stock in this kind of scripted marketing nonsense, but it’s still nice to know these (well-known?) strangers are definitely using the Meta Quest 3 while, uh, making music and playing football?
The new Touch Plus controllers, by the way, have also changed since the Meta Quest 2, in that the somewhat obtrusive tracking rings are gone, so now the accessories look—and feel—more trim and much less cumbersome. There’s haptics present but they feel rather ho-hum, especially when compared to those on the PSVR2 or DualSense, and there’s no in-headset rumble feature like the PSVR2 contains, a feature I’ve come to love on Sony’s device and find conspicuously missing on the Quest 3. Hand-tracking is also available here, and it’s okay, but I still prefer physical controllers.
Wearing glasses works pretty well inside the Quest 3, as Meta has added two distinct inner buttons to extend the headset’s face padding, and this allows room for most human spectacles. It still doesn’t feel ideal to wear glasses in VR, as it always seems cramped, which is why I’m seriously considering investing in some prescription VR lenses at some point. They essentially just live inside the headset so you can di