Meta Quest 3 review: Upgrades include lying down mode and better passthrough

A sleeker, slimmer headset 

The Meta Quest 3 is a lot slimmer than the Meta Quest 2, and it’s all thanks to those sweet, sweet pancake lenses. While it’s roughly the same weight as the Meta Quest 2, it has a smaller, less bulky profile overall, and we found the weight was more evenly distributed closer to our head (read: no slipping down your face if you don’t tighten the straps just right).

The first thing you’ll notice with the Quest 3 are those big honking camera sensors on the front. Instead of a blank face, you’ve got three pill shapes on the front. The left and right sensors power the mixed reality passthrough, letting us see the outside world in full colour, while the middle sensor is responsible for depth. There are also two sensors near the front of the bottom of the headset, which are responsible for tracking. It looks a little bit more sci-fi than the older Quest 2, but we kind of like it.

It’s a sleeker, more streamlined headset with plenty of adjustable elements, which helped us get the right fit, the perfect distance from our eyes and adjust the interpupillary distance (IPD) of the device.

There are new eye-relief buttons on the inside, too. When you press the button and pull the headset outwards, you’ll have more space for your glasses. Press the button and push the headset inwards and you’ll be able to get your eyes even closer to the screen, theoretically increasing your field of view.

However, we tried a pair of fairly minimalist glasses on the maximum eye-relief setting and we still found our glasses were getting a little squashed within the headset, so your mileage might vary with this one. While we did notice the field of view was definitely wider than the Meta Quest 2, it’s not a groundbreaking amount, so don’t expect the Quest 3 display to stretch out across your vision.

But with the improved IPD, wearing glasses might not be as big a deal. Unlike the Quest 2, there’s an IPD wheel at the bottom left, so we could lengthen or shorten the distance between our eyes much more precisely, compared with the older model. The IPD range is bigger too: 58mm-71mm versus the Quest 2’s 58mm-68mm. When we scrolled our finger on the wheel, we were told how much our IPD had changed in increments of one, so we weren’t just scrolling wildly in the dark here, either.

Overall, the facial interface is really comfortable and well-cushioned, and the fabric head strap is super soft. We wear the device for at least a couple of hours at a time and it never feels heavy.

When you’re first setting up the Meta Quest 3, you’ll be taught how to adjust your straps, set the IPD and more. But the biggest quality of life improvement is that Guardian can now automatically detect room boundaries, so you don’t bump into walls and tables.

No more drawing wonky lines on the ground and hoping for the best. All we had to do during setup was look down at the ground and watch as the Guardian traced neat little lines around the walls and furniture. Height was detected automatically, too, thanks to the tracking cameras. We could still edit the boundary manually if we wanted, but oh did this give us back minutes of playtime.

Everywhere’s a sweet spot

We also need to talk about those higher-resolution pancake lenses and the improved full-colour passthrough. As you’re setting up the device, a world of colour floats into existence, which is a little jarring after living with the monochromatic passthrough on the Meta Quest 2 for so long. It’s vibrant, everything looks sharper, thanks to the higher 2,064px x 2,208px per eye resolution, and, yes, we can finally walk around the house wearing our VR headset.

Could we read our phone? At launch, it was still a little bit blurry when it came to reading real-world text. While it was more doable than the Meta Quest 2, it still wasn’t great.

Meta improved this massively in its April update when it upgraded its passthrough. It’s significantly less grainy in dim light, and we could actually read and use our phone more easily. With just a lamp on in the corner, we could walk around, see our pictures on our walls and even our TV without much bother. It was just a whole lot clearer.

That said, it’s not a ground-breaking update – we still couldn’t really read anything on our monitor or read any text on the TV. It’s much better in low light conditions, but it’s still a chore to read text that isn’t close to your eyes, like our smartphone.

There is still a little bit of warping and distortion at the edges of the screen, which is to be expected, but the improvements in picture quality and stability between the Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 are like night and day. The panels on the inside are still only LCD, so the blacks aren’t as dark on the PSVR2 and colours aren’t as vibrant, but it’s a significant step up from the second-generation device.

There really isn’t a need to worry about getting the right sweet spot anymore, either. With the Meta Quest 3’s upgraded lenses, everywhere is a sweet spot. We got a good, clear view in and out of virtual reality games, no matter where our pupils were positioned. That shimmering effect with menus has also gone. Everything stays fixed, menus are extremely clear and there are no weird, pulsing or wavy effects. There is still glare, but you’ll need to be looking for it to find it anywhere near distracting, and we haven’t yet noticed any major screen-door effect.

The controllers have been slightly overhauled, too. Goodbye tracking ring, hello Touch Plus controllers, as they’re called. They’re like the Meta Quest Pro controllers but without the extra cameras. We weren’t accidentally bashing the rings together anymore, and while, initially, we feared the new controllers might not track as well, they, arguably, track better than the Meta Quest 2’s. However, they aren’t rechargeable like the Meta Quest Pro controllers, so you’ll still need an AA battery for each.

On the topic of tracking, hand tracking has been massively improved on the Meta Quest 3 – latency was radically reduced when playing games such as Beat Saber. Even when we threw our arms back to hit some cubes, the Meta Quest 3 was still able to predict where our hands went and bring them back quickly when they came back into view. Navigating the Quest menu is also smoother and more responsive. It’s just a much more stable experience, so we could actually ditch our controllers if we wanted to.

In December, Meta added upper body tracking to the Quest 3, and we tested it out using the Dodge Arcade demo, where we moved our body around by leaning, squatting and jumping to avoid flaming fireballs and footballs. We could see our actual character moving their body into the same positions that we were in real life – it was pretty cool.

Meta has since added a lying-down mode to the Quest 3. A feature that the Apple Vision Pro had at launch and came to the Quest 2 and Quest Pro first. Now, when you want to lie down in bed and watch a movie in virtual reality, you’ll be able to do so. You’ll have to toggle it on in the Experimental Features settings and enable lying down mode, and the floor level won’t be set based on your standing or sitting position when you lie down.

The Meta Quest has never been more fun

The first game we played was First Encounters, an exclusive demo that showcases the potential of mixed reality games on the Quest 3. Booting it up, we were invited to start scanning our rooms, floors, walls, ceilings and furniture, creating a digital map of our home. We could go as far as we wanted – beyond the boundaries. Those don’t matter when you can physically see your environment.

Once that was done, part of our ceiling caved in and a rocket ship landed on our sofa. Suddenly, little creatures were in our living room, popping out from under our TV console and behind the door, and we were shooting holes in the wall. It was surreal, and a really good showcase of mixed reality games.

Sega’s Samba de Amigo: Virtual Party was another fabulous showcase of mixed reality at work. Another rhythm game in the vein of Beat Saber, we had to shake our controllers, which had transformed into maracas, and strike extravagant poses. We were grooving in our living room at the start, and then at the top of a building.

We then went for a relaxing break in Islanders VR, a city builder that let us build our own island with just our hands. It’s a fun, quiet game, where we placed fountains and fields, mansions and statues on little islands, gaining points for accuracy and losing points for proximity to other landmarks.

There’s a marked improvement in the graphics. Even the speakers are better – they’re louder, feel more immersive and have a thumpier bass.

There are a few more things to mention. The battery life is probably the only thing that hasn’t been improved. You still only get between 90 minutes and three hours on a single charge, and it still took us around two hours to charge from zero to full.

Finally, the price: the Meta Quest 3 costs significantly more than the Meta Quest 2. The 128GB model costs £479.99, while the 512GB model (a newer, bigger storage option for the third-gen device) costs £619.99. The Meta Quest 2 previously cost £399 (now £199, Amazon.co.uk), so that’s almost a £200 price increase for the new version. But this is a huge upgrade, and more features are planned. The Meta Quest 2 is also four years old, and the industry has moved on a lot since then, so the price hike isn’t a complete surprise.