But Meta’s latest devices are mostly about gaming and photography, two uses for this tech we’ve been hearing about for years. The promise of the metaverse was supposed to be bigger than that: a blending of real and virtual worlds to help us feel closer to faraway friends or augment our actual surroundings. Meta’s new products offer few new ideas about how we’ll interact with the technology, what we’ll do with it and how to keep it from being creepy.
Here are our first impressions of each product.
The Quest 2 was a covid-19 pandemic lockdown hit for a niche of people looking for an escape from their living rooms through immersive games. The Quest 3 improves the device’s speed and screen resolution (by 30 percent), and it’s a little bit thinner. But little has changed about its battery life, weight or how it feels to wear. It still leaves an imprint on your face after wearing it for a while.
The biggest change is that while wearing the goggles, you can see a view of the world around you thanks to color pass-through cameras. Meta says this ability, which first debuted in its more expensive Quest Pro last year, will unlock a whole world of “mixed reality” capabilities.
Having a view of the space around you does make wearing a VR headset feel less isolating, a significant problem with earlier Quest devices. Double tap on the side arm, and a view of what’s around you will replace your VR. You can worry less that you’re about to accidentally punch a lamp.
The problem is this pass-through doesn’t work particularly well. Double tapping to pull it up takes a moment. And the view feels like you are, perhaps, underwater. When you wave your hand in front of you, it appears to warp the space around it. We tried reading a physical book and typing a text message on a phone while using pass-through, and it was doable, but not particularly pleasant.
Also missing: The ability to track eyes, which is available in the more expensive Quest Pro and is central to how you operate Apple’s Vision Pro. (Just looking at something is the equivalent of hovering a mouse over it.) Meta said there was only so much technology it could pack into a $500 headset. Fair enough.
The biggest letdown is there still doesn’t appear to be a killer app to take advantage of the Quest 3’s mixed reality capabilities. The only good example we saw was a section of a “Stranger Things” game that let us tear holes in the world around us to peer at — and battle — creatures from the Upside Down. But even that was just a small taste of mixed reality, baked into a larger game that doesn’t always feature it prominently.
Meta promised there would be more mixed reality apps and experiences to come, including the ability to add virtual furniture and fixtures (such as a wall-mounted jukebox) to real-world spaces.
The Quest 3 is available for preorders Wednesday and ships Oct. 10.
New Ray-Ban smart glasses
Meta and Ray-Ban — yes, that Ray-Ban — first released a pair of smart glasses that record visuals and play music in 2021. At the time they felt more like a stylish proof of concept than a serious product.
Fast-forward two years, and Meta’s updated glasses fix nearly everything we didn’t like about the originals. This time, the glasses use a sharper, 12-megapixel camera sensor — that means the photos and videos we captured no longer looked noticeably worse than what our phones could record. (Spokespeople compared the glasses’ camera quality to Apple’s iPhone 11.)
The open-air speakers are louder, so we could hear our music (and the bass in it) more clearly over the din of the demo space. And now, these glasses can live-stream directly to Instagram or Facebook — not that we expect most of you to try this.
Those updates mean these glasses are a more mature and more usable tool. And if you’re a creator — or just someone who likes capturing snippets of your life for posterity — it’s not hard to find these things somewhat tempting. But here’s the real question: Are they any less creepy?
That depends on which part of this equation you find unsettling. If it’s what the glasses can do, Meta has made some notable, if perhaps not always noticeable, tweaks. The company says, for instance, that the new glasses have a larger white indicator light that now blinks when recording or streaming — a change meant to make it more clear to bystanders when they’re on camera.
And if some unscrupulous jerk tried to cover up that indicator — say, with a piece of tape — the glasses are designed to “prevent the camera from working,” said Li-Chen Miller, Meta’s vice president of product for smart glasses. If someone tries, she added, the companion app on their smartphone will specifically tell them to remove the obstruction.
Disempowering creeps is always worth celebrating. But if what you’re really weirded out by here is the idea of discreet, face-worn cameras becoming ubiquitous, well, Meta hasn’t said much that will make you feel better. Apart from talking about that indicator light, all the company offered to assuage the unnerved are a set of guidelines for responsibly using the glasses — guidelines that are, of course, purely optional.
The Ray-Ban smart glasses are available for preorders Wednesday and ship Oct. 17.
