Review: Meta Quest 3S

The first thing you’ll likely notice about Meta’s new Quest 3S is that it costs only a few hundred dollars, not many hundreds (or thousands) like other virtual reality headsets. The price stands out, because the Quest 3S arrives only a few months after Apple’s Vision Pro—a heavy and buggy $3,499 VR headset—was released to disappointing sales numbers.

Instead of appealing to developers and early adopters with deep pockets, as Apple tried to do, Meta wants its headset to appeal to more casual users. For them—the newbies and the VR-curious—$300 is a much more attractive price. (That’s for the 128 GB of storage space, by the way. Add another $100 if you want the 256 GB model.)

Those casual users will be greatly pleased. The Quest 3S does exactly what it’s supposed to do; it functions slightly better than the Quest 2 that it replaces but not quite as well as the Quest 3. While I know this is not what Meta intended, it sure does feel like the S in the name is meant to stand for “sweet spot.” Meta has created an affordable headset that delivers thrills without fuss, making the Quest 3S the thing that might get a lot of people (me included) into VR at long last.

Same but Different

Photograph: Meta

Though the 3S repurposes many of the parts from the Quest 2, the new headset makes some changes that put it a step above the budget model before it. In place of an invisible touch-sensitive button on the side of the Quest 2 headset that triggers video pass-through that lets you see your surroundings, the 3S has a dedicated button on the bottom of the headset. Directly next to it is a volume switch. Using tactile buttons to control these basic functions feels more reliable than double tapping the side of your headset, which never really worked perfectly.

Resolution is 1,832 x 1,920 pixels per eye, still lower than the Quest 3’s 2,064 x 2,208 resolution. The 3S uses different optics than the Quest 3’s pancake lenses, which usually offer a clearer view than what you see on the 3S. The fresnel lenses on the 3S can cause more fuzziness to appear at the edges of your vision. It took me lots of adjusting the straps and lens tweaking to figure out the optimum viewpoint, but once you get there, the rest of the experience becomes relatively straightforward.

Bring Me the Horizon

Photograph: Meta

Meta’s hardware is really just a vessel to draw people into its library of games and its own VR metaverse, Horizon Worlds. Horizon Worlds feels more lively than it has in the past, but it is not yet the thriving social hub Meta wants it to be. A typical trek through the different worlds of Meta’s verse will include bouts of absolute emptiness, loading screens to get from place to place, and, when a room is populated, the energetic shouting of packs of very loud children who seem to be everywhere. It’s not exactly my scene.

But beyond Horizon Worlds, the offerings on Meta’s platform are actually very good. There are a ton of popular games for just about anyone, from the kid-friendly Gorilla Tag (exactly what it sounds like) to the much more mature medieval psychopath simulator Blade & Sorcery: Nomad. Some games even benefit greatly from the VR-ification, like the VR version of Superhot, which makes you feel like you’re the main character of an action movie, smashing apart bad guys in slow motion.

The best thing on just about any VR platform, including the Quest 3S, is Beat Saber—the rhythm game that tasks you with slashing colorful blocks in time to music. It probably says a lot about the state of VR in general that its killer app remains a game that came out in 2018. But also, I will say this: Beat Saber rules, dude, and the 3S is the cheapest way to get to play it if you haven’t had the chance.

Photograph: Meta

These fun activities are clearly what the Quest 3S is meant for. Because this is not a work device, despite how companies like Meta and Apple might position their VR tech as productivity machines.

Horizon Workrooms—the metaverse for office workers that Meta announced in 2021 and has been trying ever since to convince everyone that it will replace Zoom—is just about useless for anyone whose workplace hasn’t forced them to take meetings in it. If your other meeting attendees have headsets, you’ll be able to see them as their cartoon avatars, which is a fun gimmick. Otherwise, remote desktop features are a little more functional, letting you cast your computer screen to your headset and pretend that you’re answering emails while sitting by a tranquil cartoon lake.

A desktop pass-through window lets you see your real-life keyboard on the real-life desk in front of you, but the fuzziness of the pass-through video makes the keys appear all blurry and distorted. Still, it works, and you can certainly get some work done if you’re not too worried about getting it done quickly. I tried taking a Zoom call from a remote desktop, and while it was nice to be able to look around at a serene environment with my Zoom call in a little corner at the bottom, all the other attendees saw was a video of me wearing a headset.

Just Passing Through

Photograph: Meta

The 3S is also the most comfortable VR headset I’ve worn. At 18.13 ounces, it’s very light—though only ever so slightly lighter than the Quest 3. It is also the first VR headset that doesn’t get so warm that it makes my face sweat just by sitting there. (That changes if you’re doing push-ups in the Supernatural fitness app, of course.)

Video pass-through, the setting that turns on the outward-facing camera to let you see your real-world surroundings comes through it in full color, is something the Quest 3 already had. But here you get an upgrade from the black-and-white pass-through of the Quest 2. The VR elements are overlaid on top of the pass-through video, like a floating heads-up display that moves with you.

It’s a very nice feature that keeps you from tripping over any stools or bags you’ve left around the house. The only issue is that the image you get isn’t quite perfect. I don’t wear prescription glasses, but looking through the Quest 3S’s pass-through feels like what I imagine people who need glasses see without their lenses on. The picture is fuzzy, the depth is off, and viewing your surroundings like that can be disorienting if you’re using pass-through for too long.

Chances are you aren’t going to spend a ton of time traipsing around your house or on the street with the headset on, so a fuzzy picture isn’t the worst thing. But it is slightly annoying when you need to do something on another device, like check a text on your phone, or reply to the dozen Slack messages that have shown up on your laptop screen since putting the headset on. The pass-through video is just too fuzzy to read the text on anything smaller than a stop sign.

That, of course, is part of the problem with VR headsets writ large: It is hard to do just about anything else outside of your headset without just taking the dang thing off.

Photograph: Meta

Battery life on the Quest 3S ain’t great. Meta says the 3S gets around 2.5 hours of battery life, though I drained it much more quickly than that. Hanging out in Meta Horizon Worlds and playing games like Beat Saber, I was able to eke out around an hour and 40 minutes of run time. That seems short, but I found that it worked out to just about as much time as I wanted to keep the thing on my face anyway. (This also means your kids won’t be able to spend an entire day bouncing around the metaverse either, so let’s call this shorter-than-expected battery life a blessing in disguise.)

The Quest 3S suffers from some occasional input and software issues; sometimes when I click around in the store menu and select an app to see more about it, the whole window just vanishes and I'm back at the home screen, where I have to start over again. The user interface can be clunky too, especially if you’ve opened up several games or apps and are trying to move between them. This is all minor, though, because once you’re in the service you want to be in, like playing a game or watching a YouTube video on the giant screen right in front of your eyes, the functionality is rather seamless.

The Quest 3S really has a lot going for it for the price and is clearly intended for the VR curious. It is not the heaviest-hitting VR headset money can buy, nor should it be, because it is both intended and works as the go-to entry point for anyone looking to dip their foreheads into the world of VR.