the first What you’ll probably notice about Meta’s new Quest 3S is that it costs only a few hundred dollars, not many hundreds (or thousands) like other virtual reality headsets. The price stands out, because the Quest 3S arrives just a few months after Apple’s Vision Pro, a heavy and buggy $3,499 virtual reality headset, was released to disappointing sales figures.
Instead of appealing to developers and early adopters with deep pockets, as Apple tried to do, Meta wants its headphones to appeal to more casual users. For them, newbies and those curious about virtual reality, $300 is a much more attractive price. (By the way, that’s for the 128GB of storage space. Add another $100 if you want the 256GB model.)
Those casual users will be very satisfied. The Quest 3S does exactly what it’s supposed to do; it performs a little better than the Quest 2 it replaces, but not as well as the Quest 3. While I know this isn’t what Meta intended, it sure sounds like the S in the name stands for “sweet spot.” “Meta has created an affordable headset that delivers thrills without the fuss, making the Quest 3S the device that could bring a lot of people (including me) into virtual reality at last.
Same but different
Photography: Meta
Although the 3S Reuses many of the parts from Quest 2.The new headset makes some changes that put it a step above the previous budget model. Instead of an invisible touch-sensitive button on the side of the Quest 2 headset that activates video streaming and lets you see your surroundings, the 3S has a dedicated button on the bottom of the headset. Right next to it is a volume switch. Using touch buttons to control these basic functions seems more reliable than double tap the side of your headphones, which never really worked perfectly.
Resolution is 1,832 x 1,920 pixels per eye, still lower than the Quest 3’s 2,064 x 2,208 resolution. The 3S uses different optics than the Quest 3’s pancake lenses, which generally offer clearer vision than what’s available. go in the 3S. The Fresnel lenses on the 3S may cause more blur to appear at the edges of vision. It took a lot of adjusting the straps and adjusting the lenses to find the optimal point of view, but once you get there, the rest of the experience becomes relatively easy.
Bring me The Horizon
Photography: Meta
Meta’s hardware is really just a vessel to draw people into its game library and its own virtual reality metaverse, Horizon Worlds. Horizon Worlds feels livelier than in the past, but it’s still not the thriving social hub Meta wants it to be. A typical journey through the different worlds of the Meta-verse will include episodes of absolute emptiness, loading screens to get from one place to another, and, when a room is populated, the energetic shouts of packs of very noisy children who seem to be everywhere. Not exactly my scene.