Meta Quest 3
I’m gonna be honest upfront, I don’t like Meta. I never have. I don’t like their business practice, and I don’t like their underhanded techniques. Having said that, they make damn fine hardware such as the recent Meta Ray-Bans and the Quest 3.
I was a big fan of the Oculus Rift back in the day. I used the developer kit, then I went to the Oculus Rift, and then I got to the Oculus Rift S. When Meta bought out Oculus, I was turned away from the platform. I moved to the HTC Vive XR Elite to fill that gap. Unfortunately, while the hardware was excellent, the software was very lacking and still to this day feels like pre-release.
I had observed the Quest from afar for awhile, wanting to play my old games again on it, such as Beat Sabre. But I realised there was no other better platform around when it came to VR and gaming. So I finally caved, and bought one.
And I have never been happier with VR.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not perfect. The interface is pretty clunky, and they try and force a whole bunch of Meta Horizons shit down your throat. But for gaming, for the joy that is playing a VR game, it is magical. This won’t replace my Apple Vision Pro for content consumption, but it kicks the bollocks of it when it comes to games.
The specs are decent, with a good resolution on the LCD screens (2064×2208 per eye) and nice pancake lenses. The passthrough is in colour, but a little soft and grainy. The sound is quite good, and it’s pretty light at 515g (something something qubits and farthings in Freedom Units).
The games are top notch though, with some of my current go to pieces listed here:
Beat Sabre (duh) - Light sabre rhythm game
Smash Drums - Drum-based rhythm game
Arizona Sunshine I and II - Zombie shooter
Wander - First person Google street view
Brink Traveller - Detailed 3D immersive environments around the world
Battlemarked - D&D with figurines
Les Mills Body Combat - Boxing workouts
Maestro - Conducting an orchestra
The Climb I and II - Rock climbing
Robo Recall - iRobot the game
Vader Immortal I, II and III - Light sabre wielding dojo trainer
It’s very easy to get set up and playing with friends as well, with in-game comms often supported. Steam Link is also supported out of the box and was very stable over my WiFi 6 network. Sometimes Steam itself gets a bit flaky though.
It’s priced at $AU799 (you could buy over seven of these for a singlt Vision Pro..), so not too expensive, and it has a very robust library of software. Most games are around $15-$35, with some very premium titles such as Deadpool VR. Overall, if you want to dip your toes into VR, but don’t want to break the bank, the Quest 3 is a pretty good place to start.
