Picked up the Quest 3 on Tuesday and I've basically been wearing it around the house like a weirdo ever since. $499.99 for the 128GB one, which, yeah, that's a jump from the $299 the Quest 2 launched at back in the day, but I'm not going to pretend I didn't see that coming.
The headline feature is the color passthrough and honestly it's the first time a "mixed reality" pitch from Meta has actually felt like more than a marketing slide. With the Quest 2 the passthrough was this grainy black-and-white fisheye nightmare that was only good for making sure you weren't about to punch your coffee table. This is full color, reasonably sharp, and low-latency enough that I walked around my living room for a solid ten minutes just looking at my own furniture through the headset like an idiot. There's something genuinely different about having virtual windows and UI panels sitting on top of your actual room instead of getting fully sealed off in a black void. I get why they're leaning on this so hard now.
Here's my actual complaint though, and it's a dumb one but it's mine: the strap. For $500 you get the same cheap elastic strap situation Meta's been shipping since forever. No dial, no rigidity, just a stretchy band that constantly needs readjusting if you've got anything resembling hair or glasses. The Elite strap, which is the one with the actual knob on the back that makes the thing not slide around, is sold separately. Last I checked it runs somewhere around $70 for the basic version and more if you want the battery pack built in. That's an accessory tax on top of an already-not-cheap device and it bugs me every single time I put it on. Not a dealbreaker, just one of those decisions that makes we wonder who's making the call to ship the worse strap by default when they clearly have a better one sitting right there in the accessories catalog.
Controllers are noticeably better too, no more tracking rings, which means less bumping them into doorframes, which is a very specific 2023-me problem but a real one. The tracking itself, using the cameras on the headset instead of the ring sensors, has been solid so far, no weird dropouts even in a room with a decent amount of clutter. I haven't tried it in bright daylight yet, that's apparently where some of these camera-based systems start to struggle, so we'll see.
Small tangent, but this happened the same week so it's stuck in my head as connected even though it isn't really: Amazon ran their October Prime Day thing, Big Deal Days or whatever they're calling it this time, on the 10th and 11th, same day the Quest 3 actually shipped. I ended up grabbing a 1TB SSD for around fifty bucks during that sale that I genuinely didn't need, purely because the price looked good at 11pm and my judgment gets worse the later it gets. Classic impulse buy behavior that this blog has documented approximately a thousand times over the years and will apparently keep documenting forever. The drive's fine. I still don't have a use for it.
Anyway. Battery life on the Quest 3 is the same story it's always been with standalone headsets, somewhere around two hours if you're doing anything graphically demanding, which for mixed reality stuff with passthrough running constantly feels like it drains even faster. I haven't rigorously timed it, this is vibes-based reporting, but don't expect to marathon anything without the headset getting warm and the battery percentage dropping in a way that makes you paranoid.
I keep going back to the passthrough thing though. It's the part that actually changes how you use the device day to day, not just for games but for random stuff like checking a message without fully leaving whatever VR app you're in. Whether that's worth five hundred dollars plus another seventy for the strap that should've been included is a separate question and I honestly haven't decided yet. Ask me again after the return window closes.