Quest 3 hands-on confirms Meta is making a ‘very thin and light’ headset

Hands-on look at Meta Quest 3 reveals massive improvements to the Meta Mixed Reality headset, as detailed in Mark Gurman power on newsletter For Bloomberg today morning. Gurman says the Quest 3, now codenamed Eureka, is “far lighter and thinner” than the original Quest 2, which bodes well for its comfort during extended use.

In February, MetaVR executive Mark Rabkin told employees that Quest 3 would be more expensive than its predecessor and that “we have to prove to people that all this power, all these new features are worth it.” He said Meta has sold 20 million Quest headsets so far.

He also previewed the lighter design, explaining that “the main North Star for the team was from the moment you put this headset on, Mixed Reality has to make it feel better, easier, more natural … You can walk comfortably through the house knowing that you can see perfectly fine. You can place anchors and things on your desktop. You can have your coffee. You can stay there longer.

The report confirms some of the other big improvements we’ve been expecting, like the second-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip, resulting in better overall performance.

It has also been talked about in the report that Quest 3 Will not done is, namely, eye-tracking. This means games cannot use Foveated rendering, a feature present in Sony’s PSVR 2 that adjusts based on where a player is looking and allows the system to focus processing power on graphics in those places and elsewhere. and allows you to pull back.

Design upgrades from the Quest 2 include more sensors inside three pill-shaped areas that house four cameras, two of which are color cameras for passthrough video. It also features an improved system for adjusting the lens’ inter-pupillary distance – the distance between your eyes – with a wheel you can turn instead of taking the headset off and manually moving the display .

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 eliminate the Quest 2’s rings, but the depth sensor could help keep costs down by tracking the controller’s position without the need for cameras like on the Quest Pro’s controllers. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually said the Quest Pro would have a depth sensor one in Etiquette Interviewbut convenience didn’t make it to the final version,

Gurman called the pass-through video “almost life-like.” My colleague Adi Robertson called the AR mode “blurry in low light, blurry in bright light, and sometimes saturated in between.” Quest Pro.

It looks like the improvements mainly come down to how the headset’s cameras handle light and color, as Gurman didn’t think it looked particularly sharp, despite rumors of a higher-resolution display.