Gone is the nice dial for adjusting the distance between the lenses from the Quest 3, instead you have to manually push the lenses into three positions to estimate the best pupil distance. It does involve putting the headset on and off a few times (exactly the kind of friction that can easily turn off VR newcomers), but at least it’s something you only have to sort through once. This can be a bigger problem if you share the headset with your household, though.
Meta added an action button to quickly switch between a mixed reality mode that shows your room’s camera feed and a fully immersive VR view. This is something Quest 3 doesn’t have at all – instead you have to tap on its front right corner to go into mixed reality. Having a dedicated button is better for convenience, especially for new VR users, so I don’t mind that it breaks the curves of the Quest 3S design a bit.
The Quest 3S also uses the same Touch Controllers as its more expensive sibling, and once again, they’re excellent. Gone is the clunky motion tracking ring of previous models, now they’re just light controllers that fit your hand like a glove. The joysticks feel smooth and precise, and the buttons give very nice responsive feedback. It’s nothing new, though: I’ve been fascinated by Facebook’s gamepads ever since the first Oculus Touch controllers Released in 2016.
What’s most important about the Quest 3S is the Meta hardware carried over from the more expensive headset. It has a Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor, which the company claims offers twice the graphics performance of the Quest 2, as well as 8GB of RAM. That’s a bit of a jump from the Quest 2’s 6GB of memory, but it’s important for storing more detailed textures.
Now instead of having to worry about how a game will perform on the slower Quest 2, developers can simply build for one hardware specification. Less headache for developers, ideally, Meta Quest should provide more apps in the store. And the hope is that the wealth of new apps will lead people to buy more headphones. This leads to more apps being sold. It’s a virtuous cycle that could help Meta break out of the death spiral the consumer VR market has been in for years.
In use: Fast and functional VR
First thing I noticed after wearing the Quest 3S: Wow, it feels fast. Firing up the headset, loading a few apps, and navigating the Meta home environment was simply quick and responsive. It’s something I remember from the Quest 3 as well, but it feels like more of a discovery in a $300 headset. There was no lag or occasional slowdown that I was used to in Quest 2.
The actual VR experience also looked detailed and impressive. I didn’t notice much of a loss of resolution from the Quest 3, but it was readily apparent that the cheaper Fresnel lenses caused more artifacts. Edges looked a bit more blurry, I sometimes saw halos around objects, and God rays from extra shiny objects were often seen in games like this. Pistol Whip. The Quest 3’s pancake lenses, which aren’t quite as susceptible to the same visual issues, certainly look sharper.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think Fresnel lenses will make much of a difference to VR newcomers. I enjoyed VR headsets for years while living with the same artifacts. If going with cheaper lenses helped Meta lower the price of the Quest 3S to $300, it was worth it. The biggest barrier to the VR world isn’t loyalty, it’s price.
I also noticed less visual issues after I started spending significant time on the Quest 3S. I was more interested in trying to conduct the perfect symphony Maestrothanks to the headset’s precise hand tracking and immersive audio, it does a fantastic job of simulating a live orchestral experience. It was also fun to take a random pen from my desk and turn it into a virtual baton. Gaming is definitely a little more crisp on the Quest 3, but I’d wager that many people won’t be directly comparing the two headsets.
I played for an hour Mobile suit Gundam: Silver Phantom — it’s less a game and more an interactive anime movie, but it was so engaging that I started to ignore the Quest 3S’s artifacts. None of this matters if you’re immersed in a truly great VR experience. Of course, I also checked out the classics Pistol Whip and Super hotit’s still a blast to play after all these years.
Unfortunately, the Quest 3S doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of looking like a buffalo when using VR. This was especially noticeable while playing I’m a Cata game that makes me climb walls, dig through trash cans, and totally scare the crap out of the old lady in my virtual house. I was having a blast, but my six-year-old daughter started to wonder if I was crazy.
I streamed the game to the Meta app on my iPhone and mirrored the screen to my Apple TV to give it a live view of everything I was seeing. This, of course, led to him finding all sorts of ways to destroy cats in VR for me. (Hint: You can feed an old lady a cat poop sandwich.)
Like previous Meta standalone headsets, the Quest 3S can stream more intense VR experiences from gaming PCs wirelessly or via a USB-C cable. I was able to connect to my device via Wi-Fi and play for 15 minutes Half-Life: Alyx without any noticeable delay. Of course, it didn’t look as great as it did on it Valve indexbut the entire setup still costs $1,000. And of course, Index doesn’t let you play wirelessly without a computer. I was able to stream some as well non-VR Xbox Cloud Gaming titles, incl Halo Infinite and FortniteAfter connecting my Xbox controller. W2D gaming isn’t the ideal thing to do on a VR headset, but being able to virtualize a giant screen is worth it, especially if you don’t have a big TV.
While Meta positions the Quest 3 as a mixed reality device, I’ve never found it as useful as the Vision Pro, thanks to its color cameras and more capable room mapping. This is a headphone I can wear for hours while walking around the house. The Quest 3’s cameras were too blurry for extended use, and the Quest 3S suffers from the same problem. Meta’s are fun to play First Meetings demo and make aliens invade or enter your home Synth Ridersbut the Quest 3 and 3S headsets need better cameras to truly recreate reality.
That’s why I couldn’t replicate my computer using Meta’s Remote Desktop for a very long time. The virtual display looked sharp enough, but I had a hard time focusing on it with the blurry view in my office. I’d much rather take out the Quest 3S and look at my monitor to do some work.
As an entertainment device, the Quest 3S is a comfortable way to sit back and enjoy movies, TV and 360-degree videos. Home theater heads may find that videos aren’t as crisp as the Quest 3, and contrast and black levels are light years away from the Vision Pro’s MicroLED displays, but for most people, the Quest 3S is perfect. It’s certainly better than watching something on a laptop or tablet (or god forbid, a phone).
In my test week, the Quest 3S would typically last about two hours and 20 minutes without needing a charge. That’s slightly better than what I’ve seen on the Quest 3, which can drain the battery in just two hours. This is one area where the Quest 3S’s lower resolution displays could benefit, as they are less demanding on the GPU. You can always plug in a 10,000mAh external pack to expand the Quest 3S’s 4,324mAh internal battery, or leave it plugged into a charger for long gaming sessions.
Price and competition
The Quest 3S starts at $300 with 128GB of storage, but you can double that to 256GB with the $400 model. If you need 512GB of storage, then the $500 Quest 3 is your only option. Given the optical advantage of a more expensive headset, the $400 Quest 3S doesn’t exactly seem like a smart buy. If you need more than 128GB of storage, it’s best to save until you get to the Quest 3.
The Meta still doesn’t have much competition in the world of cheap standalone VR headsets. HTC’s Vive Focus 3 lineup, which now includes the new Focus 3 Vision, starts at $1,000 and is aimed more at enterprise and business customers. The HTC Vive has fewer games and apps in its showcase than the Meta, so their platform doesn’t make much sense to the average user.
Collection
The Meta Quest 3S is the best $300 standalone VR headset we’ve ever seen. It is comfortable to wear and provides a fast VR experience. It’s so good that you probably won’t notice that it’s not as sharp as Quest 3 or has more visual artifacts. When truly immersed in VR, these issues will disappear.
Next to the company Ray-Ban smart frameshis Orion augmented reality glassesand billions have already been spent on VRMeta clearly believes that the future of computing is in your face. But even lightweight smart glasses still remain glassessomething that many people avoid wearing by wearing contact lenses on their pupils. We don’t know exactly how the public will react to real AR glasses. But actually this is a problem for the future. For now, we can just enjoy the Quest 3S: Great VR for a relatively cheap price.
