Quest 3 just began shipping last week and headsets are rapidly arriving in the hands of eager buyers. While the 128GB model appears to be in strong supply, the more expensive 512GB model might be more popular than Meta expected.
We checked stock availability for direct purchases from Meta.com for Quest 3 (128GB) and Quest 3 (512GB) across all regions where the headsets are sold. The latest shows that most regions estimate delivery of the 128GB model within one week, but the 512GB model won’t deliver for a week or more in most regions:
That seems surprising considering that Quest 3 is the company’s most expensive Quest headset yet, priced at $500 for the 128GB model and going up to $650 for the 512GB model.
There’s a few possible explanations for the current stock situation:
Meta underestimated demand for the 512GB model
Meta anticipated the demand for the 512GB model and set aside more of the initial inventory for third-party retailers
For some manufacturing reason, Meta couldn’t build up as much initial stock of the 512GB model, or can’t manufacture them as quickly
Of course, Quest 3 is also available in many other stores, like Amazon, Best Buy, and other regional retailers, each of which have different levels of stock.
We’ll continue to monitor the stock of both Quest 3 models to understand more about how they’re selling.
Less than a week since launch, Quest 3 has already gotten the full iFixit teardown treatment, showing off just how slim (and seemingly difficult to repair) the headset really is.
iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari pried apart Quest 3, revealing the innards of Meta’s new $500 mixed reality standalone. The short of it: it’s pretty complicated to dismantle and there aren’t any repair parts as such, getting a [4/10] repairability score in Mokhtari’s video (linked below).
Getting past the user-removable bits is simple enough. Take off the headstrap and pop out the facial interface, as anyone would do to install either aftermarket or first-party accessories. Removing the rubberized face plate, which isn’t meant to be user-removable, proved challenging though, as Mokhtari snapped an internal clip with his plastic spudger, and by the looks of it, busted the top structural bridge of the face plate too.
Image courtesy iFixit
That’s some pretty thin plastic—forgivable enough since Meta likely designed the headset to make weight savings wherever possible. Still, something to watch out for.
While it’s a much thinner package than Quest 2—about 40% thinner when you don’t consider the facial interface—the headset’s new slim design is largely owed to its inclusion of pancake lenses. The inclusion of these new lenses, which use polarization-based reflection to fold the optic path into a small space, doesn’t impede the teardown process any more than larger Fresnel lenses might.
Here’s a 360 look at the headset under X-ray, courtesy Creative Electron, showing off just how tightly everything is sandwiched together:
– Things aren’t glued down thankfully, although the headset does feature a ton of screws—more than 50 by Mokhtari’s reckoning, many of which you’ll need to contend with to get to the battery.
Screws aplenty | Image courtesy iFixit, Creative Electron
Quest 3’s battery is sandwiched between the display and mainboard; while keeping the battery close to the user’s center of gravity puts less strain on the neck, it requires you to dig deep into the headset’s guts. One big benefit: Quest 3’s battery is pretty normal, unlike Quest Pro’s unique curved, back-mounted battery.
Quest Pro battery (left) and Quest 3 battery (right) | Image courtesy iFixit
Replacing the battery is technically possible, although there aren’t any official replacement parts. Getting there is apparently a bit more complicated than replacing a battery on a modern smartphone, although thankfully you won’t need heat guns or a host of dedicated tools to do so. Still, it appears to between the difficulty of replacing the battery of Quest 2 (harder) and Quest Pro (easier).
Mokhtari’s teardown delves into more of Quest 3’s pros and cons, such as the cost saving benefits of not including eye-tracking, and providing a cheaper IR-tracked Touch Plus controller over Quest Pro’s inside-out tracked Touch Pro controller. Another curiosity: Quest 3’s depth sensor fits into the blank spot where it would have otherwise gone in Quest Pro had they not scrapped the sensor right before production.
Catch the full eight-minute video below, which critically isn’t a repair guide as such. We’re hoping to see that posted on iFixit fairly soon, so stay tuned.
Following Quest 2 almost three years to the day, Quest 3 is finally here. Meta continues its trend of building some of the best VR hardware out there, but it will be some time yet before the headset’s potential is fully revealed. Read on for our full Quest 3 review.
I wanted to start this review saying that Quest 3 feels like a real next-gen headset. And while that’s certainly true when it comes to hardware, it’ll be a little while yet before the software reaches a point that it becomes obvious to everyone. Although it might not feel like it right out of the gate, even with the added price (starting at $500 vs. Quest 2 at $300), I’m certain the benefits will feel worth it in the end.
Quest 3’s hardware is impressive, and a much larger improvement than we saw from Quest 1 to Quest 2. For the most part, you’re getting a better and cheaper Quest Pro, minus eye-tracking and face-tracking. And to put it clearly, even if Quest Pro and Quest 3 were the same price, I’d pick Quest 3.
Photo by Road to VR
Before we dive in, here’s a look at Quest 3’s specs for reference:
Resolution
2,064 × 2,208 (4.5MP) per-eye, LCD (2x)
Refresh Rate
90Hz, 120Hz (experimental)
Optics
Pancake non-Fresnel
Field-of-view (claimed)
110ºH × 96ºV
Optical Adjustments
Continuous IPD, stepped eye-relief (built in)
IPD Adjustment Range
53–75mm
Processor
Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2
RAM
8GB
Storage
128GB, 512GB
Connectors
USB-C, contact pads for optional dock charging
Weight
515g
Battery Life
1.5-3 hours
Headset Tracking
Inside-out (no external beacons)
Controller Tracking
Headset-tracked (headset line-of-sight needed)
Expression Tracking
none
Eye Tracking
none
On-board cameras
6x external (18ppd RGB sensors 2x)
Input
Touch Plus (AA battery 1x), hand-tracking, voice
Audio
In-headstrap speakers, 3.5mm aux output
Microphone
Yes
Pass-through view
Yes (color)
MSRP
$500 (128GB), $650 (512GB)
Hardware
Even if the software isn’t fully tapping the headset’s potential yet, Meta has packed a lot of value into the Quest 3 hardware.
Lenses
Photo by Road to VR
First, and perhaps most importantly, the lenses on Quest 3 are a generational improvement over Quest 2 and other headsets of the Fresnel-era. They aren’t just more compact and sharper, they also offer a noticeably wider field-of-view and have an unmatched sweet spot that extends nearly across the entire lens. That means even when you aren’t looking directly through the center of the lens, the world is still sharp. While Quest 3’s field-of-view is also objectively larger than Quest 2, the expanded sweet spot helps amplify that improvement because you can look around the scene more naturally with your eyes and less with your head.
Glare is another place that headsets often struggle, and there we also see a huge improvement with the Quest 3 lenses. Gone are the painfully obvious god-rays that you could even see in the headset’s main menu. Now only subtle glare is visible even in scenes with extreme contrast.
Resolution and Clarity
Quest 3 doesn’t have massively higher than Quest 2, but the combination of about 30% more pixels—3.5MP per-eye (1,832 × 1,920) vs. 4.5MP per-eye (2,064 × 2,208)—a much larger sweet spot, and a huge reduction in glare makes for a headset with significantly improved clarity. Other display vitals like persistence blur, chromatic aberration, pupil swim, mura, and ghosting are all top-of-class as well. And despite the increased sharpness of the lenses, there’s still functionally no screen-door effect.
Here’s a look at the resolving power of Quest 3 compared to some other headsets:
While Quest 3 and Quest Pro score the same here in terms of resolving power, the Snellen test lacks precision; I can say for sure the Quest 3 looks a bit sharper than Quest Pro, but not enough to get it into the next Snellen tier.
While the optics of Quest 3 are also more compact than most, the form-factor isn’t radically different than Quest 2. The slightly more central center-of-gravity makes the headset feel a little less noticeable during fast head rotations, but on the whole the visual improvements are much more significant than ergonomic.
Ergonomics
Photo by Road to VR
Ergonomics feels like one of just a few places where Quest 3 doesn’t see many meaningful improvements. Even though it’s a little more compact, it weighs about the same as Quest 2, and its included soft strap is just as awful. So my recommendation remains: get an aftermarket strap for Quest 3 on day one (and with a battery if you know you’re going to use the headset often). Meta’s official Elite Strap and Elite Strap with Battery are an easy choice but you can find options of equal comfort that are more affordable from third-parties. FYI: the Elite Straps are not forward or backward compatible between Quest 2 and 3.
While the form-factor of the headset haven’t really improved, it’s ability to adapt to each user certainly has. Quest 3 is the most adaptable Meta headset to date, offering both continuous IPD (distance between the eyes) and notched eye-relief (distance from eye to lens) adjustments. This means that more people can dial in a good fit for the headset, giving them the best visual comfort and quality.
I was about to write “to my surprise…”—but actually this doesn’t surprise me at this point given Meta’s MO—the setup of Quest 3 either didn’t walk me through adjusting either of these settings or did so in such a nonchalant way that I didn’t even notice. Most new users will not only not know what IPD or eye-relief really does for them, but also struggle to pick their own best setting. There should definitely be clear guidance and helpful calibration.
The dial on the bottom of Quest 3 makes it easy to adjust the IPD, but the eye-relief mechanism is rather clunky. You have to push both buttons on the inside of the facepad at the same time and kind of also pull it out or push it forward. It works but I found it to be incredibly iffy.
Field-of-View
In any case, I’m happy to report that eye-relief on Quest 3 is more than just a buffer for glasses. Moving to the closest setting gave me a notably wider field-of-view than Quest 2. Here’s a look at the Quest 3 FoV:
Personal Measurements – 64mm IPD (no glasses, measured with TestHMD 1.2)
Absolute min eye-relief (facepad removed)
Min designed eye-relief
Comfortable eye-relief
Max eye-relief
HFOV
106°
104°
100°
86°
VFOV
93°
93°
89°
79°
And here’s how it stacks up to some other headsets:
Personal Measurements – 64mm IPD (minimum-designed eye-relief, no glasses, measured with TestHMD 1.2)
Quest 3
Quest Pro
Quest 2
Bigscreen Beyond
Valve Index
HFOV
104°
94°
90°
98°
106°
VFOV
93°
87°
92°
90°
106°
Audio
Another meaningful improvement for Quest 3 is improved built-in audio. While on Quest 2 I always felt like I needed to have the headset at full volume (and even then the audio quality felt like a compromise), Quest 3 gets both a volume and quality boost. Now I don’t feel like every app needs to be at 100% volume. And while I’d still love better quality and spatialization from the built-in audio, Quest 3’s audio finally feels sufficient rather than an unfortunate compromise.
Controllers
Photo by Road to VR
Quest 3’s new Touch Plus controllers so far feel like they work just as well as Quest 2 controllers, but with better haptics and an improved form-factor thanks to the removal of the ring. Quest 3 is also much faster to switch between hand-tracking and controller input when you set the controllers down or pick them up.
Processor
The last major change is the new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 chip that powers Quest 3. While ‘XR2 Gen 1’ vs. ‘XR2 Gen 2’ might not sound like a big change, the difference is significant. The new chip has 2.6x the graphical horsepower of the prior version, according to Meta. That’s a leap-and-a-half compared to the kind of chip-to-chip updates usually seen in smartphones. The CPU boost is more in line with what we’d typically expect; Meta says it’s 33% more powerful than Quest 2 at launch, alongside 30% more RAM.
Quest 3 is still essentially a smartphone in a headset in terms of computing power, so don’t expect it to match the best of what you see on PSVR 2 or PC VR, but there’s a ton of extra headroom for developers to work with.
Valve is a notorious black box when it comes to basically everything. A recent update to Steam client for VR though suggests the company is still working behind the scenes on what appears to be its long-awaited standalone VR headset.
As revealed by tech analyst and consummate Steam data miner Brad Lynch, a recent update to Steam’s client included a number of VR-specific strings related to batteries, which seems to support the idea that Valve is currently readying the platform for some sort of standalone VR headset.
Image courtesy Brad Lynch
The update also included mention of new UI elements, icons, and animations added to the Steam Client for VR—something it probably wouldn’t do for a competitor’s headset, like Meta’s soon-to-release Quest 3 standalone.
Meanwhile, South Korean’s National Radio Research Agency (RAA) recently certified a “low-power wireless device” from Valve, also spotted by Lynch. It’s still too early to say whether the device in question is actually a standalone VR headset—the radio certification only mentions it uses 5 GHz wireless—however headsets like Meta Quest 2 are equally as vague when it comes to RAA listings.
Granted, Valve hasn’t come out and said it’s developing a standalone VR headset yet, although with mounting competition from Apple and Meta, 2024 may be the year we finally see the ‘Index of standalone VR’ come to the forefront. Valve Index has widely been regarded as the ‘best fit’ PC VR headset, owing to its excellent quality, performance, and comfort—something we called “the enthusiast’s choice” in our full review of the headset back when it launched in 2019.
But it hasn’t been entirely mum either. In early 2022, Valve chief Gabe Newell called its handheld gaming PC platform Steam Deck “a steppingstone” to standalone VR hardware, nothing that Steam Deck represented “battery-capable, high-performance horsepower that eventually you could use in VR applications as well.”
– – — – –
While a capable, high-end standalone VR headset from Valve is certainly something to salivate over, a few big questions remain: What will happen when Valve opens Steam up to standalone VR content? How would the largely Meta-heavy ecosystem react as Steam becomes a new outlet for VR games? And what if Valve’s headset is instead capable of playing some subsection of standard PC VR content? We don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but with Valve’s continued interest in VR, we’re still pretty hopeful to find out.
Immersed, the team behind the titular XR productivity and co-working app, announced Visor last month, a slim and light VR headset designed for work. Now the studio has opened “fully refundable” pre-orders for two distinct flavors of the device.
Immersed is offering a 2.5K per-eye Visor model for $500 and a 4K per-eye Visor model for $750. Besides including different resolution OLED microdisplays, functionally both models are the same. The company is also offering a Founder’s Edition Visor 4K for $1,000, which is said to ship six months before the standard Visor 4K.
Immersed says on the website both 2.5K and 4K headsets include:
Hand & eye tracking
6 Degrees of freedom
5+ Screens
100° Field of view
Ultra widescreen
Custom IPD, nose-insert, and light-blocker
25% lighter than a smartphone
HD Color Passthrough
Stems & strap attachments Included
Image courtesy Immersed
It’s still early days, it seems. The Visor hardware is said to be “both wired and wireless,” indicating it has onboard processing for mobile VR experiences and a battery, however the company hasn’t released any specs yet on chipset or battery life.
The company says headsets are custom-built for each user however, which includes locking in each user’s interpupillary distance (IPD) and shipping nose inserts and light blockers which are “closest to your face’s shape,” Immersed says in the product’s description.
As for shipment dates, so far Immersed says it’s slated to “commence and continue [shipment] throughout 2024.” What’s more, Immersed says it’s offering those pre-orders as “full refundable reservations.”
Here’s the fine print:
Refund Policy: Preorders are fully refundable reservations. You may cancel your reservation at any time before your Visor is produced and receive a full refund to the original payment method by emailing [email protected]. Due to the custom-built nature of Visor, fulfillment time will vary and shipment dates are our best estimates. Delays, if any, will be communicated via email.
Pimax announced that Portal, its hybrid VR headset based on a Nintendo Switch-style console, is almost ready for launch, as the company prepares to ship to all Kickstarter backers in April 2023.
Over the years, the Shanghai-based company has been known for its wide field-of-view (FOV) PC VR headsets which include large, high-resolution displays and wide FOV optics, making Pimax one of the few to offer such devices directly to consumers. With the announcement of Portal and standalone headset Pimax Crystal, the company seems to be striking out in a new direction from its PC VR roots though.
As a hybrid device, Portal works as both a Nintendo Switch-style handheld (running Android), and a Samsung Gear VR-style headset which uses a dedicated VR shell housing and Switch-style controllers, which snap into their own bespoke housing.
While strapping an Android device into a headset shell is decidedly a throwback concept, Portal managed to attract over $350,000 from backers in the device’s 2022 Kickstarter campaign. Putting Gear VR comparisons aside, the device is being couched as a jack of all trades, as it’s set to offer both 6DOF head and controller tracking for VR gameplay on top of acting as both a handheld console and living room entertainment hub.
In a fresh status update, Pimax says it’s now finalized Portal’s hardware, with mass production set to start. Admittedly, Pimax says it’s currently optimizing the software for Portal, with heat dissipation, power consumption, and controller connection marked as areas in need of improvement. This also includes what it calls “rare” tracking issues and SDK-related game porting issues.
By the end of May, Pimax says it will have “more than 20 VR games” available for the Portal VR mode. Furthermore, Pimax says the QLED version of Portal will support native PC VR via HDMI, while other versions will support streaming PC VR content via WiFi e6 and USB-C.
This comes on the heels of the news last month that Pimax had secured a $30 million series C1 financing round, something the company says will aid in the rollout of both Portal and Crystal headsets.
A Wall Street Journal report maintains Meta’s Quest platform had 6.37 million monthly active users as of October 2022.
The report doesn’t include a breakdown of which headset is seeing the most engagement, however it’s likely a majority of those users come from Quest 2. The original Quest, which was released in 2019, is currently on its way out. The company’s enthusiast-grade headset Quest Pro costs $1,000, a $500 drop from its original $1,500 launch price.
Meta hasn’t officially detailed just how many Quest headsets it’s sold since the company released the standalone in 2019, or its Quest 2 follow-up a year later for that matter, however a report by The Verge last month alleged the company has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets. Although not confirmed, this figure likely includes all Quest headsets.
It’s nowhere near what traditional game consoles have achieved, however for VR it’s fairly impressive. For scale, Sony has shipped over 32 million PlayStation 5 units and over 117 million PS4 units to date; the PlayStation platform as a whole garnered 112 million monthly active users in Q3 2022.
For the still-nascent industry, Meta is far and ahead the leader of the space. Of its 500+ titles on the Meta Quest Store, 40 have grossed over $10 million in revenue. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Quest platform has now seen more than 200 apps make over $1 million as of February 2023, an increase of 44% from the previous year.
This comes alongside the news that Meta’s best-performing app, the block-slashing rhythm game Beat Saber, has generated over a quarter billion dollars in sales since launch in 2018.
Meta is planning to ship a VR headset in 2024 which the company wants to make as accessible as possible to consumers.
According to a report by The Verge, Meta’s VP of VR, Mark Rabki, told thousands of employees in a memo that it plans to release a consumer VR headset in 2024, codenamed Ventura.
“The goal for this headset is very simple: pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market,” Rabki wrote in the memo.
Meta seems to be positioning Ventura as a ‘Quest 3 Lite’ of sorts. In the reported memo, the company announced its upcoming Quest 3 would be targeted at enthusiasts, which is said to be a “bit more money” than the current $400/$500 headset, while also including mixed reality capabilities similar to Quest Pro. The company has publicly confirmed Quest 3 will release at some point this year.
Additionally, the report maintains that any ‘Pro’ level headset will be “way out in the future” after Ventura is released in 2024.
This means Meta will be selling Quest 3 at the same time it releases Ventura in 2024, and likely within the life span of Quest Pro too, so the company will need to offer all of them at fitting price points as to not muddy the waters.
It’s uncertain where Meta hopes to cut corners with the ostensibly cheaper standalone. One thing the company can do is ship without motion controllers, which would cut down on overall price, although that would stymie consumer access to the back catalogue of VR games. Not all games make use of Quest hand-tracking.
With Ventura, the company could opt to essentially update Quest 2’s hardware with minor modifications, like replacing the Fresnel lenses with pancake optics to slim down the overall profile, and add a faster chipset.
Whatever the case, it seems the company is looking at capturing the low end of the VR market, which would better lock in a new generation of VR users into the Meta ecosystem—something the company needs if it hopes to increase user retention. Offering a cheaper headset could also potentially broaden Meta’s access to emerging markets, somewhere Chinese competitors like Pico Interactive may succeed given the chance.
Chinese tech giant Tencent is reportedly shuttering its XR development team, ostensibly putting a hold on its home-grown VR ambitions. That may not mean Tencent is hanging up the XR towel for good though.
As reported by Chinese language publication 36Kr, WeChat developer Tencent is set to promote Meta Quest 2 in mainland China. At the time of this writing, Meta officially supports the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan and most countries in Europe.
Using headsets from Meta would provide Tencent with a ready-made hardware platform so it could focus on creating a game library and its own software, but more importantly it could soon counter ByteDance’s Pico Interactive, the VR headset creator most recently known for its Quest 2 competitor, Pico 4.
ByteDance allegedly won a fierce bidding war against Tencent in early 2021 to acquire Pico, which then went on to release Pico 4 to consumers in Europe and Asia. It also looked like Pico was eyeing the US as well, as it opened a headquarters on Meta’s home turf in June 2022, however it was reported late last week that ByteDance, parent company of TikTok, is actually laying off hundreds at Pico Interactive.
This isn’t the first time Meta hardware has found its way into mainland China. Meta (then Facebook) released the 3DOF standalone Oculus Go in 2018 in China thanks to a manufacturing partnership with Xiaomi, branding the headset as the ‘Mi VR Standalone’.
As 36Kr points out, Tencent partnered with Nintendo in 2019 to sell a version of Switch, which provides access to localized games and online services. The report maintains the partnership with Meta will also follow a similar distribution model.
It seems Meta is finally taking the original 2019 Quest behind the shed this year, as the company announced it’s set to deprecate first-party social features on the device, which includes access to Parties and Meta Horizon Home. Meta also announced it won’t be delivering new features beyond critical bug fixes and security patches until 2024.
The company sent out an email to users of the original Quest detailing the upcoming changes. Here’s that email in full:
We launched Quest 1 over four years ago and we are grateful to the Quest 1 community for pushing VR forwards. As we look to the future, we remain committed to supporting the community of Quest 1 users and will continue to support the headset with a few changes:
You will still be able to use your Quest 1 headset and available apps.
We won’t be delivering new features to Quest 1.
We plan to continue maintaining the system software with critical bug fixes and security patches until 2024.
Quest 1 users will no longer be able to create or join a party.
Quest 1 users who currently have access to Meta Horizon Home social features will lose access to these features on 5 March 2023. You won’t be able to invite others to your Home or visit someone else’s Home.
If you have any questions about these changes or about your Quest 1 headset, we encourage you to contact Meta Store support here: https://store.facebook.com/help/support/
Thank you to the entire Quest 1 community for helping us get to where we are today.
Launched in May 2019, the original Quest wasn’t just the company’s first 6DOF standalone headset—it was a valuable new platform that sparked an explosion in content revenue, making it the target platform du jour for VR game developers. Many of the hits of today owe their success to having gained foothold on the original Quest.
Quest (left) comapred to Quest 2 (right) | Photo by Road to VR
A little over one year later, Meta (ex-Facebook) released its successor, Quest 2, which substantively included higher resolution displays (1,440 × 1,600 OLED vs 1,920 × 1,832 LCD) and a higher refresh rate (72 Hz vs up to 120 Hz), both of which were driven by a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2—a significant upgrade over the Quest 1’s Snapdragon 835.
Undoubtedly, Quest 2 has since cemented itself as the go-to home for VR developers looking to maximize profit; two years after its launch, Quest 2 content has managed to generate $1.5 billion in revenue.
Although you’d think social function deprecation and a clear end date to security patches for Quest 1 should come as no real surprise; it’s old and you’d be hard-pressed to find it new in the box anywhere. Still, seven of the top 10 best-rated games on the Quest Store support the original Quest in addition to Quest 2. A majority of them were released after the launch of Quest 2.
Granted, Quest 1 users should only really focus on the security patch death date; even then, the headset will still be able to access all store content in addition to being used as a PC VR headset with Steam.
At CES 2023 HTC revealed its new Vive XR Elite headset which is positioned as a Quest Pro competitor. In terms of features and hardware, the headset is largely a refinement of formfactor over anything else; and while it’s undoubtedly compact and lightweight, it may be hampered by an unclear value proposition and some ergonomic details that went overlooked.
Everyone’s head shape, nose size, and eye positions are different. That said, the first time I put on Vive XR Elite it was clear to me that there wasn’t nearly enough room for my nose… something that I have no issue with on almost every other major headset on the market (even HTC’s other VR headsets).
It’s not that it’s impossible to get the pressure off your nose—the optional top-strap (which HTC smartly included) makes this easy enough—but the problem is that if I raise the headset up to get weight off of my nose, my eyes are no longer in the sweet spot of the lens, making the view through the headset sub-par. More padding around the nose would have a similar issue of moving the lenses out of the sweet spot.
While I didn’t get to use the headset for an extended period of time, I have a strong suspicion that the nose thing is going to be a literal and figurative pain point on this headset. And as someone who doesn’t have a particularly large nose, I can’t imagine I’m going to be the only person with this issue.
Photo by Road to VR
The nose thing isn’t the only ergonomic oversight that was immediately apparent. There’s also the fact that the rear pad, which is designed to cup the back of your head, doesn’t cushion your head enough to prevent contact between your skull and the battery on the back. That means that as you tighten the headset you can feel a big, flat, plastic surface pushing against your head. That’s compared to something like the Quest 2 Elite Strap (which the rear of Vive XR Elite appears to emulate), where I can only feel the pads hugging the back of my head, but never the battery behind them.
Photo by Road to VR
Beyond these worrying ergonomic subtleties, the headset’s fundamentals feel solid across the board, making the Vive XR Elite the company’s most refined standalone to date. But from a feature and performance standpoint, the headset feels more like Quest 2 than Quest Pro, which puts it in an awkward place with its $1,100 pricetag.
Visually, Vive XR Elite’s pancake lenses are pretty good on the clarity front, with good edge-to-edge clarity, though falling short of the excellent lenses on Quest Pro. The use of non-Fresnel lenses means a reduction in glare and god rays compared to Quest 2, though the resolution and visibility of the screen door is about the same between the two headsets (1,920 × 1,920 vs. 1,920 × 1,832). And while the peripheral field of view feels a little tight, the added dioptre control (for changing the focus of each lens) will be welcomed by those with glasses, and even those without will be served well by the continuous IPD adjustment (which includes an on-screen measurement readout and calibration pop-up).
Photo by Road to VR
Inside-out head-tracking feels pretty good and is surely ‘good enough’, though the instantaneous rotational latency doesn’t feel as tight as Meta’s bar-setting inside-out solution. Importantly, the tracking feels better than Vive Flow, which in my experience has too much latency for long-term comfort. Controller-tracking on Vive XR Elite also feels solid, and with cameras on each side pointed almost entirely to your left and right, coverage ought to be good (potentially surpassing Vive Focus 3).
As the name implies, the HTC is pushing the XR Elite as a headset that does passthrough AR in addition to VR. The headset’s color pass-through view isn’t stellar. Similar to Meta’s headsets, the XR Elite attempts to rebuild the depth of the real world virtually to provide geometric correction and depth cues, but even with a depth-sensor on-board (which Quest Pro lacks), my experience with the headset’s passthrough AR showed a lot of warping due to incorrect depth-mapping.
Without being able to do a direct side-by-side comparison, my impression was that XR Elite wasn’t quite as sharp as Quest Pro when it comes to passthrough AR. Granted, the passthrough AR on both headsets headsets is definitely in the same approximate ‘class’ (not sharp enough to read text from your smartphone and quite poor dynamic range at that).
Photo by Road to VR
Just like with Quest Pro, the quality and application of passthrough AR feels entirely undercooked, with the handful of AR apps I tried on the headset not sufficiently answering the question ‘why AR?’. But now that another headset on the market is embracing and enhancing this capability, perhaps the answers to that question will come a bit sooner.
– – — – –
Photo by Road to VR
Considering its performance and features, Vive XR Elite seems to share the same core problem as Quest Pro—and that’s the value proposition. Even if we ignore any potential ergonomic mishaps… at best Vive XR Elite is akin to a somewhat more compact version of Quest 2. And even if we ignore that Quest 2 has a much more extensive content library… it’s difficult to see how, for most people, Vive XR Elite can justify an $1,100 price tag compared to Quest 2 at $400.
HTC officially unveiled its next consumer-focused headset at CES 2023 today. Called Vive XR Elite, the standalone mixed reality device boasts a feature set that positions HTC to go toe-to-toe with Meta’s Quest Pro, but at a notably cheaper price of $1,100.
The moniker ‘Flowcus’, a portmanteau coined by VR analyst and YouTuber Brad Lynch when the headset’s design was initially leaked in November, seems to ring true with Vive XR Elite. The design seems very much like a mashup of Vive Flow, a casual VR content viewer using pancake lenses, and Vive Focus 3, the company’s enterprise-focused standalone.
Vive XR Elite is starting pre-orders today, with shipping slated for sometime in late February. There’s no exact launch date on the books, so in the meantime let’s talk about some of the features HTC announced today, some key specs still in need of clarification, and the headset’s slew of gaming-focused content.
But first, the trailer:
Features
Unlike HTC products in recent memory, Vive XR Elite is specifically targeting gaming, fitness, productivity and on-the-go content consumption, the latter of which is thanks to a convertible battery headstrap that can be unplugged in favor of a glasses-like temple pieces.
It’s an interesting feature that’s a first for any major VR headset, which would hypothetically allow you to lean back in a seat without having a bulky back-mounted battery to contend with.
Of course, you’ll need some other power source to run the Vive XR Elite if you opt to remove the battery, be it a separate powerbank or a USB cable connected to the mains.
What’s more, Vive XR Elite is a mixed reality device, meaning it can switch between standard VR games and those that use color passthrough AR, putting it in the same category as its chief competitor Meta Quest Pro. And like Quest Pro, Vive XR Elite can be connected to a PC via USB-C for PC VR content, as well as wirelessly over WiFi, with support up to WiFi 6E. We’ll talk a little more about content in a bit.
Below, you’ll see the headset has four room-tracking camera sensors, one on each side and one hidden respectively under each faceplate. In the center is a single RGB camera for color passthrough as well as a depth sensor, which in theory would increase accuracy of room-scale tracking and object recognition.
Image courtesy HTC
Vive XR Elite also boasts Android app streaming, letting you interact with Android apps and games on a virtual cinema screen of “300 inches,” the company says. Users can also link Bluetooth gamepads to their phones for a fuller mobile gaming experience. That’s probably the only way you’d catch us playing Fortnite on a VR headset like this, since manipulating controls on the phone’s touch surface probably wouldn’t be effective.
Here’s a top-down look at the headset, which gives you a good view of how the back-mounted battery attaches, a look at the tightening twist knob, a clear look at the battery’s USB-C charging port. It’s also impressively slim, owing to the inclusion of pancake lenses.
Image courtesy HTC
In addition to supporting the same controllers that come with Vive Focus 3, the headset also supports Vive Wrist Tracker, a hand-tracking device that can be attached to the user’s wrist, or to objects like gun controllers, Ping-Pong paddles, or tools.
Here’s a view that shows headset’s diopter settings for its pancake lenses, which ostensibly allows near-sighted users to go without glasses, going up to -6D independently for both eyes. That little slider below the right lens is a mechanical IPD adjuster going from 54-73mm; nope, no eye-tracking here, at least not without the optional eye-tracking module that’s arriving at some point this year.
Image courtesy HTC
Audio is served up via two open-ear speakers integrated into the arms of the headset. We’ve poured over all product images and have yet to see space for a 3.5mm audio jack for external audio. That hole near the bridge of the headset appears to be an attach point for the forthcoming facial-tracking module, which is also slate to arrive sometime this year. We’re currently at CES, so we’re adding that to our list of features in need of clarification.
With a consumer target clearly in its sights, HTC is offering up a slew of gaming-focused content for Vive XR Elite (full list below) that includes what the company says is “100 new pieces of MR and VR content” including Demeo, Hubris, Yuki, Maestro, Les Mills Body Combat, FigminXR, Unplugged, Finger Gun, and more.
Post-launch content will include Everslaught: Invasion, and later in the year full MR games like Eggscape. As you know, a consumer VR headset is nothing without games, so it’s good to see HTC do its due diligence to attract some of the top games to the headset. No Beat Saber, but we wouldn’t expect Meta to prioritize porting the popular block-slashing rhythm game to such a direct competitor.
Image courtesy HTC
The company says Vive XR Elite will also be available for enterprise users at some point, with more information coming later this year.
Vive XR Elite also has connectors for both face and eye-tracking modules, which are set to launch separately sometime in 2023. We’ll be going hands-on at CES 2023, so make sure to check back for our full impressions of HTC’s next big leap into consumer VR. We won’t be able to say just how good a proposition Vive XR Elite truly is until we get our hands on it, and see if it really stacks up to the competition. As it is, it lacks eye-tracking for out of the box social presence and foveated rendering, and we still don’t know how it goes mano a mano with Quest Pro in the passthrough department with its single RGB passthrough camera.
Key Specs
Here’s an abridged spec breakdown. We’re working to get a more detailed list once we go hands-on here at CES 2023. We’ve included question marks (?) where we’ll probe for more detail in-person:
External Battery – removable and hot-swappable, 30W fast charge, 26.6Wh, mAh(?), typical playtime(?)
Price
One of the biggest selling points is HTC Vive XR Elite’s price, which although clearly not near the sub-$500 console price that typically gets us excited, it’s coming in a fair bit cheaper than the $1,500 Meta Quest Pro.
Note: many regions include taxes calculated in the final price above (UK, EU, AUS, etc) but a notable exception is the US. Sales tax varies widely through the US based on each state, so the final price in USD could range from exactly $1,099 in a minority of states with little to no sales tax to around $1,240 in states on the higher end of the range. Here’s the regional price breakdown:
US $1,099 exc. VAT
UK £1,299 inc. VAT
DE/FR €1,399 inc. VAT
NO 15,499 NOK
SWE 16,299 SEK
DK 11,099 DKK
A$ 2,099 inc. GST
NZ$ 2,299 inc. GST
Content
HTC provided a full content lineup, although the company hasn’t made it entirely clear which games are considered launch-day titles and which will come post-launch. HTC is calling the list below “launch window content,” so we’re checking with them now and will update once we know.
In any case, you’ll see a lot of overlap between the latest games on Quest 2 here. Highlights include Demeo, Green Hell VR, Les Mills Bodycombat, Unplugged, Hubris, Ancient Dungeon, The Last Clockwinder, and Ultrawings 2 to name a few.
We have boots on the ground at CES 2023, so check back soon for our impressions of Vive XR Elite and all things AR/VR for this year’s biggest consumer electronics show.
That seems surprising considering that Quest 3 is the company’s most expensive Quest headset yet, priced at $500 for the 128GB model and going up to $650 for the 512GB model.
