Most of the Meta Quest 3 leaks suggest the headset will be improved over the Quest 2 with a faster Snapdragon chip, pancake lenses, more precise hand tracking and a full color passthrough. The most visible differentiation will be new mixed reality apps and games like Quest Pro.
But Meta’s engineers admit that MR is “still in its early stages” compared to VR, and all the tech I’ve seen so far has been a hodgepodge (pun intended). .
Meta attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco with one clear goal. To encourage developers to invest in mixed reality. In his two official panels at GDC 2023, an indie like Cubism’s Thomas Van Bouwel, who brought MR passthrough to games, explaining how Presence Platform can be used to adapt experiences to any physical space, his developer emphasized success.
We were excited to see what other Oculus Publishing developers were doing with mixed reality. But I’m more convinced of MR than ever before. isn’t it The killer tool that makes the Quest 3 sell like hot cakes. Perhaps it takes another generation to become its own.
Mixed reality challenges
Got the chance to show @LaserDanceGame to some people at @OwlchemyLabs yesterday! I’m a huge fan of their work and very excited about what they’re building next! pic.twitter. com/cYzSmVHGQLMarch 24, 2023
Cool experiences like laser dancing (over it) demonstrates the potential of mixed reality to transform living spaces into dynamic gaming areas, rather than being confined to small unfurnished circles. However, Van Bouwel also outlined how player size and mobility, large and narrow rooms, furniture from sparse to crowded levels, etc. need to be considered when designing. .
Fundamentally, MR games must incorporate a large amount of variables, restrict gameplay to fixed spaces such as tabletops, and encounter all sorts of unpredictable problems.
To address this, mixed reality games need to incorporate spatial anchors. This creates a world-locked frame of reference that persists no matter which direction the headset wearer is facing. Using Meta’s Scene API, games can capture and model the player’s surroundings to create a 2D or 3D “bounding box” in which MR content resides. However, it is up to developers to take advantage of this technology.
Spatial anchors can also be shared between two headsets, allowing users in the same location to share a local multiplayer experience similar to playing chess (or something more dynamic) at a real dining table. Right now, it takes two expensive Quest Pros to do that, but in theory, buying two Quest 3s shouldn’t be too much of a hassle.
Still, relying on everyday people buying two consoles just for local multiplayer or letting one play an old Quest 2 in black and white is not a business model for success. So I don’t know how many developers will succeed. Invest your time in this technology.
Mixed reality experiences also need to consider new factors such as depth. In Beat Saber, note blocks are displayed tens of meters away. But if you try a similar experience in MR, nearby walls can limit the depth you need to work with. This means that blocks have to be much slower for players to react in time.
Mixed reality may or may not be more social than virtual reality, depending on whether you play with people who are physically or digitally nearby.
Meta recognizes the challenges of media and created the Presence Platform to help developers address them. However, these SDKs are not perfect. For example, users must manually place spatial markers.
When the developers of the panels that used them asked about upgrades to things like automatic anchor recognition, meta product managers Meenal Nalwaya and Aashay Desai most often said they were “considering” or “testing” new features. However, there was no timetable for implementing them.
When asked if a mixed reality game could work in two remote spaces (i.e. each player has its own local MR bounding box but interacts with the same content), Nalvaya said that players would always have to pass through. I said I could see my surroundings through the phone, but otherwise she said I need to check (which felt like a ‘no’ to me). In that sense, MR is more sociable in terms of staying aware of her surroundings, but online in her multiplayer she is less sociable than in VR.
Desai and Nalvaya concluded the panel by stating, “We are now scratching the surface of mixed reality.” He may feel like he’s stepped back into the early experimental days of the Oculus Rift, when VR developers were still experimenting and learning.
VR > Immersive MR
If the Quest 3’s full-color pass-through camera is anything like the Quest Pro’s, there’s a distinct visual gap between the fidelity of the surroundings and the graphical objects produced by the mobile chipset.
As my colleague Nick Sutrich noted in his review of the Quest Pro, the color passthrough quality is “impressive, but not perfect. There is still fringing around edges where there is a lot of contrast.” Colors are not always 100% accurate. into real life.
In VR, you get a consistent aesthetic experience, even if everything is in low resolution like Resident Evil 4 VR. In mixed reality, the gap between reality and virtuality tends to be more obvious and appear artificial.
Additionally, Nick explains how the Quest Pro’s open glasses design allows you to see your surroundings, making these experiences more You can always check your surroundings, increasing the sense of immersion.
Mixed reality brings cool experiences to the real world. Most gamers would rather leave this world behind altogether.
The VR-focused Quest 3 shows a front-camera view, but it’s limited to the field of view of the lens, which needs to fit within 90-100 degrees (or between the FOV of the Quest 2 and Quest Pro). You can see what’s in front of you, but you have to be a little more careful with environmental hazards.
There’s a reason so few mobile games have successfully replicated the blueprint of Pokémon GO. Most of the time, people play games to transfer themselves to other worlds, not other worlds to theirs.
VR fans wear headsets avoid You can spend hours playing your favorite Quest games.I think some people don’t mind option of MR modes in games like Demeo that were already top-down tabletop experiences. Otherwise, I think many people treat MR as a cool novelty when they first unbox the Quest 3 headset and switch to VR immediately.
Where MR Makes VR Better
VR has many “killer apps” that gamers are obsessed with, such as rhythm games and exercise games. Augmented reality glasses still have a long way to go, but having the opportunity to play Steam Deck and Xbox games on Nreal Air at GDC helped me understand why AR has become so popular in that niche.
In my opinion, Mixed Reality is too new for Meta to find a killer app. The Quest Pro is a prosumer work device that makes good use of mixed reality, but it’s a niche device that most people won’t buy, even with the $500 price drop. It’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s $3,000 Reality Pro headset offers even more on that front, but all the leaks and skirmishes suggest Apple engineers are also worried about their chances of success. suggests.
So, aside from sharper images when you’re outside of a VR game, why are you excited about the Quest 3’s mixed-reality passthrough? To make the game better for people who live in
In games like Blaston for the Quest 2, you can switch from a virtual arena to passthrough mode and see the grayscale outlines around you so you don’t accidentally slam your controller against a wall or chair. they.
If a Quest user like me has a small apartment and is worried about their cat sprinting away, the pass-through is a very useful tool for hybrid play spaces, allowing them to run into furniture without worrying about slamming into the space. You can see the people and pets that enter.
The only problem is that the Quest 2’s low-res B&W camera wasn’t really intended for this use, and the graphics are poor. But I tried out Resolution Games’ new Spatial Ops beta at GDC. It uses the Quest Pro’s full-color mixed reality to great effect. With the Quest 3 and its upgraded camera, you get a lot more VR games that subtly incorporate your surroundings into the virtual world, but it doesn’t look that terrible.
By the time mixed reality technology hits the masses, you may be considering buying a Quest 4 instead of a Quest 3.
If not, Meta and its partners will have to sell the idea that Quest 3’s native MR game is more than just an experimental gimmick. MR may make the headset more accessible for inexperienced VR users. This is because there is no simulation sickness and the surroundings are more familiar. But it’s less magical than the virtual worlds people have come to expect from Quest headsets.
Most Oculus headsets last 2-3 years before being replaced with a newer model. Meanwhile, mixed reality games continue to emerge. But I’m not convinced MR will be like Quest 2 was a breakout VR console after Quest 1 laid the groundwork. this is A breakout moment until Quest Pro 2 or Quest 4 comes along.
