Meta Connect 2024 was not packed with surprises, with many of the products and talking points widely predicted by the XR cognoscenti. But it made up for it with perhaps the most comprehensive true AR glasses yet and the competitive price of the Quest 3S VR headset. So, what is the Meta Quest 3S? Phil Charnock picks over the details…
September in the XR world always feels like Christmas. We’ve seen Snap reveal their latest Spectacles and Draw & Code have had our hands on the recently revealed HTC Vive Focus Vision too.
Now it was the turn of industry leaders Meta to reveal, primarily to the XR development community, what we can buy over the coming months and to show us where the industry is likely to head next.
Note I said that Meta is the industry leader. Apple may have given us the Vision Pro, but there is no denying that when it comes to shifting hardware Meta leads the way.
However, while Meta announced some class-leading products, the spectre of Apple loomed over Menlo Park. How? The key difference at Connect in 2024 was the emphasis on 2D applications within 3D spatial environments. It couldn’t help but feel very similar to Apple in that regard.
Mark Zuckerberg wasted no time at all to announce the Quest 3S. He spoke for approximately 30 seconds before saying ‘Let’s jump right in’ and that he did. I guess that made sense – the device had long been the subject of leaks and was pretty much a totally open secret, which made the way it was presented to the world and its price tag the main talking points.
So, what is the Meta Quest 3S? In short, the processing power, controllers, hand tracking and mixed reality colour passthrough are all the same as the Quest 3. The difference lies in the lenses. Pancake lenses are out and there are fresnel lenses, like the Quest 2, in their place.
This is a shame as the lenses in the Quest 3 are superb and they justify its extra cost, however, a high-spec lens with a lower-spec processor was never going to happen.
One of the key messages – at what is still very much a developer conference – is that by creating what Meta called the ‘Quest 3 family’ they are encouraging apps to use all of the available power in both devices. Currently, a VR app studio like ourselves would typically design
Meta Quest apps with the lower-spec Quest 2 in mind as there are so many of them out there. However, with the older device now out of production (as is the Quest Pro), the more powerful chipset will soon take precedence and new VR apps across the board will perform noticeably better in the future.
For us that is great news and long term it will be for consumers too. In the medium term, there will come a painful transition for Quest 2 owners that will see hit apps no longer working on the device, so be prepared for that. At a highly competitive $299 (or £289), the new headset will make for a brilliant replacement for the venerable Quest 2.
The content for Quest 3S that was shown felt very telling. What’s notable is that Zuck’s talk went straight into flatscreen experiences – watching video or playing Xbox Game Pass, for example.
The full 3D games – including the bundled Batman Arkham Shadow – came at the end of this segment of the presentation. Indeed, in the developer talks following Zuck’s star turn, the chat about Meta Horizon OS also focused on 2D apps running in 3D space.
Was this the Apple influence at work? Not the existence of the 2D content per se, more the priority it was given in the presentations.
A stat shared in a later Meta Connect presentation is that more than half of Quest owners use browsers and 2D screens. While this is a high proportion, it implies more (or all) owners engage in 3D content, which showed why it felt telling that the spotlight shone so brightly on flat experiences.
Speaking of Apple-influenced apps, Hyperscape was a neat addition to Meta’s offer. This was a 3D recreation of a scene using what appears to be photogrammetry via a mobile phone camera. This felt like a rival to Apple’s spatial photos, although photogrammetry viewers are not new.
In an age of NERFs and lidar, it felt like a very welcome feature but not as cutting edge as we may expect from one of the biggest spending innovation divisions in tech.
While Meta will be hoping to create a new class of apps for the Quest 3 family, it is worth mentioning one amazing statistic. The recently renamed Meta Horizon Store now has ten times the number of apps it had as recently as April! That isn’t solely a surge in the number of apps out there, it is at least in part due to shifting App Lab, the haven for the experimental, to effectively being an early access programme within the main store.
So if you buy a Quest 3 or 3S you can delve into a huge amount of content, just don’t expect a store full of apps that push the limits of the device just yet.
