Meta Quest 3

In what can almost be considered the infancy of the VR wave, what must have been quite a few years ago, I was quite interested. No, "passionate" is not a word I would use, as even back then I didn't really believe in the concept of playing all my games with a heavy piece of plastic strapped to my face, but around the launch of HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and also Valve Index, I had faith in VR, and we even named Half-Life Alyx as our Game of the Year in 2020.

But that was four years ago, and since then I haven't even worn a pair of VR glasses. I never got to try so-called "mixed reality" with passthrough, and I've only observed the improvements to the technology and user experience from a distance, while the general interest in VR as a concept seems to have waned quite a bit.

Until recently, when I put on a pair of Meta Quest 3 in our office for the first time. Let me start by saying that this has not in any way changed my relationship with VR as some kind of paradigm shift in the way we experience media, nor do I believe in Meta's dream of a "metaverse". But having said all that, Meta Quest 3 is an insanely impressive piece of hardware, it's relatively aggressively priced and I've been using it every single day for the past week or so to play Batman: Arkham Shadow, working out via FIT XR, mesmerising my eldest son with First Encounters and generally shopping around via my three months of free Quest+. Is this a serious gaming and entertainment platform on par with a PlayStation, or a Switch? No, I wouldn't go that far, but it's extremely impressive how close Meta is to a pretty perfect symbiotic relationship between platform and software.

Not that it matters, but Meta Quest 3 has two 2064x2208 LCD panels running between 90-120Hz. No connection to a computer is required, although it can be done both via cable and dedicated apps like Steam Link, and it runs through a combination of a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, an Adreno 740 GPU, 8GB LPDRR5 RAM, and in my case 512GB of space. There are directional speakers on either side that others in the household can barely hear but feel like a headset to you, and the two controllers have fairly precise input that outperforms Valve Index without being able to detect individual finger positions.

There's dedicated passthrough here, which means as soon as the headset starts you can see everything around you, and in relatively high resolution too. There's no delay, it's all pretty much one-to-one, but a slightly grainy texture means you're not quite as likely to forget you're wearing a headset as I've heard can happen with Apple's much, much more expensive Vision Pro. As you start an app, or whenever you want, you can seamlessly map out your playspace, the area that you consider to be the outer edges of the VR/AR experience. You can easily push the outer boundaries, create small notches between furniture, and customise this area down to the smallest detail, and Quest 3 will even recognise furniture and other objects. As you step out, it's like stepping from dimension-to-dimension, which means that the violent experiences we've seen on social media where you smash your hand into the TV or fall over the coffee table are a thing of the past.

The point is that, without commenting on the gaming experience, selection, or similar parameters, picking it up, putting it on, switching it on, and entering a VR/AR experience is completely seamless, in a way I could only dream of when I picked up the far more expensive and advanced Valve Index in 2020. In four years, we may not have pushed the concept of what a VR game should be, but we have eliminated far more user interface barriers than I thought possible in a short time frame.

It's all beautifully executed in many ways, I have to say, and this is coming from someone who has only peripherally touched VR as a concept over the last few years. From downloading games from the Quest Store and Quest+, to understanding the simple interface, to sketching out my playspace. No, running around with a plastic visor on my head will probably never be quite as seamless, but this is as close as we can get.

In terms of how the games work, there are a surprising number of full-blooded bangers here. I've played Batman: Arkham Shadow, Red Matter, Asgard's Wrath, and many others, and have also tried both the workout and yoga apps from XR, which have been a pleasant surprise. Whether there are enough games being released at a fast enough pace and with a relatively consistent quality bar is almost impossible to determine for the individual reader here, but as a novice I've had no trouble finding games or enjoying them. What is clear, however, is that Meta needs a way to categorise these games in such a way that random Fruit Ninja clones are not confused with what enthusiasts would refer to as "real" games. VR and AR can quickly become a gimmick, which is why there are a lot of moment-based gimmick games, and something like Steam's algorithm for categorising, sorting, and recommending titles from talented studios is missing here.

The "problem", if you want to call it that, is that while many of these games have impressive production values, VR is still a difficult thing for the mind to get used to. Both the aforementioned Arkham Shadow and Asgard's Wrath 2 try their best to solve the locomotion issue, but only partially succeed. Moving in Arkham Shadow takes a lot of getting used to, and had a rather bizarre effect on my brain for the first few days, even in the hours after a game session. Half-Life: Alyx partially got round this by allowing teleportation over longer distances, and then letting the player meticulously walk around the immediate surroundings. It's possible here too, but this can quickly lead to an immersion break that games just can't really fix. Some genres get around this completely, such as strategy games, which work surprisingly well as a kind of diorama where you lean over the battlefield or city as a strategist, but compared to the first-person experiences, it seems like we're really running headlong into an innovation wall here. Meta Quest 3 still hasn't managed to fix this problem.

But beyond that, the whole package is surprisingly competitively priced, surprisingly rich in good gaming experiences, and surprisingly sharp at breaking down the problems we normally associate with VR and AR. In other words, this is a quantum leap, and while there are still issues that will be hard to solve completely, it has convinced me that VR, to some extent, will "make it", even if it won't replace our computer screens or televisions within... well, the next decade.