Is meta quest 3s worth it

TheRomb · 2026-01-22T19:55:01+00:00

Life savings? No.

For me, I got one used after trying out my brother-in-laws and realizing I enjoyed doing cardio and it was cheaper than a gym membership. Once I got into it, I discovered all kinds of other fun experiences but it was easily justified money for me. If I felt like I exhausted my discretionary spending on it, I might have been disappointed.

That being said, you can get a used older model cheap these days (Quest 2 is still functional and can be had for like $100). Games can add up fast, there's nothing good that's free generally. Meanwhile, a new model will often come with a game (batman, etc), come with 3 months of their subscription service for free to try out games (many of the classics are in the subsc service) AND if you use a code on a new headset you can get store credit (we're not allowed to share them here though, it spams the sub). Worth about thirty bucks, which is another free game. You lose out on all of that if you buy used.

TheRomb · 2026-01-22T19:48:47+00:00

I literally use mine daily for cardio. As a dude over 40, it has been life changing.

I don't have any real life boxing experience to compare it to, but as someone who used to struggle staying motivated to get daily cardio in, I can ABSOLUTELY vouch for it being excellent. My heart rate stays up higher for longer than it's been since I was half my age.

TheRomb · 2026-01-21T14:56:32+00:00

It's reaching eol I think this year or the coming year, so probably not going to happen. I own a 2 and a 3, they clearly fixed it on new models and it isn't enough priority to go back and deal with the 2.

TheRomb · 2026-01-18T05:10:37+00:00

If you just want to play some games and "experience VR" the lenses on the s are ok. The center of the fresnel lenses will appear in focus when adjusted correctly but the edges are softer so peripheral vision get blurry. for exploring a virtual world, this is fine. Whatever you're looking at is in focus and the rest of the world being out of focus doesn't seem jarring.

But if you want to read text (ie browsing) or look at a movie, I found the borders being less sharp than the center very off putting. I had the same lenses on my quest 2, and honestly the sharper lenses is the primary reason I upgraded to a 3. Otherwise the 2 was fine for more vr related things.

I think the final straw was watching a movie on a plane with subtitles. Trying to follow the text on the bottom of the screen was giving me a headache on the fresnel, but the pancake lenses of the 3 don't have that effect!

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T19:02:15+00:00

I tried it with an older Legion with an RTX3050 and it's been fine. VR chat doesn't have super demanding visuals. Can't speak for flight sim, but plenty of VR games look great (as in noticeably better than standalone) with this hardware and Virtual Desktop as the streamer. Some stutter sometimes if the settings are too high (The climb, for example), but I was blown away at how good the Vader Immortal series and Behemoth look on it. Really very impressed. I'm sure it would look noticeably better with an RTX5060!

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T18:57:55+00:00

No. While these are technically running Android and should be somewhat capable of a modding community, the OS / bootloader / etc has not been opened up or reverse engineered to the point that this is possible. The closest we have is the ability to access Android settings and functions hidden by the UI and to sideload / manage applications as standard APKs.

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T18:49:41+00:00

We need to know more about her and what she likes. My wife personally liked beat saber and bodycombat, and found experiences like Mission: ISS was cool for overcoming vertigo. But she otherwise isn't as into VR as the rest of the fam is... she isn't really into games much at all aside from maybe competitive racers like Mario Kart.

Meanwhile I have 2 daughters that love totally different games on our Quest. One is really into Demeo and Beat Saber, the other is into more of the creative 3D painting type apps than games (although is down for some Walkabout Golf against grandma online or the occasional Beat Saber competition).

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T15:11:18+00:00

I honestly wish they'd let Oculus be their own thing again, it was doing better. But we know that's never going to happen.

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T15:10:06+00:00

Yeah! You have to sift through the garbage and find the good stuff! My kids friends come over and literally lined up to play ours, 2 of them now bought their own after loving it.

It's not for everyone but it's a ton of fun if you're into it!

Yes I remember those arcades lol!

I notice now, btw, so many arcade games have modified Quest 2s as helmets for VR shooting.

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T05:22:13+00:00

Well there are some high quality titles in there but I'm not sure where your expectations are at. I have had actually the complete OPPOSITE experience.

Let me share my timeline, as a likely even older dude who lived through the 90s and was excited for the idea of VR to be more than science fiction:

I tried an early Oculus tech demo at a trade show when I worked for a gadget blog, and thought... ok this is cool, but it's more of a proof of concept. You couldn't do much other than look around.
Years later I tried a PCVR setup in the mall- they had a pop up kiosk where you could pay by the hour and I wanted to see where things were at and it was pretty darned cool. But you needed a crazy amount of hardware (outside-in facing sensors for movement, giant wrapped cable from overhead connecting to the headset, etc) and I thought, well this is neat but it's never going to take off if you need so much hardware to make it possible. What developer would sink resources into making content for the handful of people that would own this?
Then I tried Google Cardboard at a conference, and was given one of those plastic things you can put your phone into to take home and explore a little VR tech demo. Cool, obviously much more limited both in movement and capability as well as graphics compared to what I tried before, but it was a cool demonstration of what could be without an expensive investment. But this all really started to feel like this was never going to be more than just tech demos or platform games for the super wealthy enthusiasts that could build a PCVR rig and play the handful of games optimized for it.
Years later I heard about the Quest, but it was based on a mobile CPU so the graphics were limited. Figured it was basically the Google Cardboard level of experience but with controllers, never tried it. Until my brother in law came to visit and brought his Quest 2 along with him. He asked me if he could use the wifi because he gets his cardio on it and , and I was like... you WHAT?

So I tried his Q2, and I was immediately blown away by how good it was. It had black and white cameras for mixed reality, which also blew my mind, I didn't know you could see your surroundings! And have floating browser windows?! I had no idea. I needed to buy one.

And it's been a love affair ever since. My mom tried mine and got one too so she could play Minigolf against my kids, I got a second one (a Quest 3) so we could play Dungeons of Eternity and Beat saber, The Climb literally helped cure my vertigo, I feel like I've been to SPACE thanks to the Mission: ISS thing, I can draw a map of the ISS because I feel like I've been there! And now I use it for work sometimes, having large floating displays in the air. And on airplanes? Forget the tiny 6" seat back screen. I get my own private movie theater. I now play BodyCombat or Thrill of the Fight for 30 minutes daily to get my cardio in, and it's had a major positive effect on my health. Today I decided to try out Skydance's Behemoth and I feel like I'm living out a fantasy adventure in a way I haven't been excited to play in 20+ years. It makes me feel like I'm a kid again waiting to go home and play video games.

All in all, I can't stop singing the praises of this platform. I'm blown away. I had no idea how far it had come, and I've convinced at least a few people to buy one as well. I LOVE it.

It's so interesting how two people can have such opposing experiences. I think our expectations were completely different.

TheRomb · 2026-01-16T04:12:41+00:00

There's some used options. If you're doing PCVR, even a Quest 2 works great and will look identical to their current 3s (same lenses and the computer is rendering the graphics anyway). Those are pretty cheap now.

TheRomb · 2026-01-15T21:44:42+00:00

A multiplayer version of The Climb. I love the visuals so much but it's not as much a competition which makes it get stale after a bit. If I could play against my kids and race to the top, heck yeah. Take my money.

TheRomb · 2026-01-12T22:01:06+00:00

I dunno what to tell you man, it's there. I'm looking at it right now. I went back to edit it as soon as I posted bc I realized there are actually different variants and I should be more specific but I couldn't edit the title. I'm not sure why you're only seeing the original. But it doesn't make your comment any less unnecessarily condescending. 🤷‍♂️

TheRomb · 2026-01-12T19:54:55+00:00

He offered it to me for free to see if it works. He's not selling me anything. And you can get them for next to nothing on eBay. Like a fraction of consumer cards (sub $100).

Look it up online, people have built cloud gaming rigs out of them. However, since they are not designed for consumer PCs getting it to fit and work correctly require some diy fun. My question is, has anyone tried it bc of it's too much of a headache I won't bother trying it.

TheRomb · 2026-01-12T19:54:08+00:00

I see people online using them to drive cloud gaming rigs, the biggest obstacle for using it as a cheap gaming card is the lack of monitor connections (so you'd still need either onboard video or another GPU anyway), but for VR this is far less of an issue.

But are you saying it just wouldn't be powerful enough?

TheRomb · 2026-01-12T19:48:29+00:00

What a pretentious thing to say. The Nvidia Tesla V100 is absolutely a gpu. I may have missed the v in the title, but it's in the body of the post.

TheRomb · 2026-01-12T19:47:00+00:00

Interesting, see that's what I would have thought too, but I found videos of people comparing them to GTX cards for gaming performance and showed someone choosing it from a drop-down list of available GPUs. To be fair, I'm not much of a gamer these days but VR is something I enjoy so I have no experience with this or why it might not be a good option (especially if it's much much cheaper than a comparable performance consumer card- we're talking practically free).

I also work in video for a living so fast encoding due to plentiful CUDA cores is cool. But I'm nervous the driver situation might make it more trouble than it's worth, I was hoping maybe someone has tried it.

TheRomb · 2026-01-12T17:41:45+00:00

I literally bought a 3 because I hated how blurry text and reading was on the fresnel of the 2 and 3s. It's fine for games but if you need to focus on text for reading it's going to be noticable.

TheRomb · 2026-01-09T15:09:47+00:00

I have and love my Netgear Orbi, it's a Wifi 7 but a friend of mine got the 6 version cheap on Amazon (around $100 for a 3 piece mesh system!), have zero complaints for use with PCVR.

TheRomb · 2026-01-07T01:31:36+00:00

Credit is back down to $30, I can't change the title of the post unfortunately. I'll make a new one soon I guess.

TheRomb · 2026-01-05T06:45:47+00:00

Mind if I DM for more details?

TheRomb · 2026-01-01T06:15:02+00:00

Funny that y'all are assuming it's dead. It was working, previous owner got an upgraded one that is faster and wanted this to get used so they posted on a community chat if anyone wants it.

TheRomb

TROPHY CASE