Virtual Reality

[Asura]

Launching with the Quest 3 is Quest Plus, which is a game subscription service. It sounds a little poor offering-wise as it's £8 a month (or £60 annual) and it provides two games a month. They stay in your account if you cancel, but you'll only be able to play them whilst subscribed.

That's actually been around since the summer. But yeah, it's not a good deal at present.

Mainly because while there are plenty of good things to play on Quest, for those of us who have been with the platform since the start, I suspect most of us own many of the games.

[MartyG]

Shows how poorly it's been received if I've never heard of it before today

[Lebowski]

Apple tax on the storage aside it looks like a decent update, is £650 not pushing this a bit out of the impulse price bracket even the base one is only £30 shy of £500

[Brad]

Pc connection still through USBC (i.e. requiring an Nvidia gou due to amd's lack of encoding support)?

[MartyG]

Or over wifi yes.

However, it looks, based on the updates to Virtual Desktop, that Quest 3 supports AV1 decode, so that should significantly increase stream quality, especially over wifi-6E or wired.

[Brad]

Oooh! Need to wait for an AMD user review

[Asura]

Funny part is I'm convinced Meta had every person who might self-describe themselves as a hardcore fan of Meta Horizon in that audience. They cheered every time something about Horizon came up, and honestly it sounded genuine.

It's bizarre when you consider just how much of a non-entity Horizon is, outside of that ~200 people. Sure, there are more than that who probably use it with some regularity, but not all of those people are going to WOOOO when you mention the name. Meta found ALL OF THEM

[Lebowski]

Funny part is I'm convinced Meta had every person who might self-describe themselves as a hardcore fan of Meta Horizon in that audience. They cheered every time something about Horizon came up, and honestly it sounded genuine.

It's bizarre when you consider just how much of a non-entity Horizon is, outside of that ~200 people. Sure, there are more than that who probably use it with some regularity, but not all of those people are going to WOOOO when you mention the name. Meta found ALL OF THEM

I had to google what meta Horizon was, (its not a mountain climbing game) for those not in the know it looks like someone took the crappy looking Avatars from Xbox 360 minus the legs and made some multiplayer games for them. they seem to pushing this horribly bland looking shooter heavily

[huxley]

Funny part is I'm convinced Meta had every person who might self-describe themselves as a hardcore fan of Meta Horizon in that audience. They cheered every time something about Horizon came up, and honestly it sounded genuine.

It's bizarre when you consider just how much of a non-entity Horizon is, outside of that ~200 people. Sure, there are more than that who probably use it with some regularity, but not all of those people are going to WOOOO when you mention the name. Meta found ALL OF THEM

Over enthusiastic employees? It was pretty cringe. E3 was always like this for a while.

So I assume this still needs a Facebook log in to work, or can you skip that if only used for PC?

[Brad]

You need a meta login...

Horizons worlds was in decline when I last looked, even though it's the most professional of them all. The people using virtual worlds don't care about quality, they care about content and it doesn't matter how janky it is apparently. People just aren't doing whatever zuck thinks they are in the meta verse, in general (it has niche use cases of course). They never will either. Even if they made a quest that was the size of a pair of regular glasses.

[huxley]

Ok so its sort of separate and you can have multiple accounts.
The Horizons worlds just never seemed to gel with people and then on the other hand you have VRChat that took off in a big way.
It still has a a fair amount of users after the initial surge along with some interesting rooms / games, but it can be very toxic.

[Asura]

Ok so its sort of separate and you can have multiple accounts.

Yeah, you can create a "Meta" account, and any Facebook stuff is completely optional - and you only have to give a very small amount of info in the account creation process, and the privacy terms are quite strict. It's a lot like a Google account or Xbox Live account.

Meta aren't screwing around with this, either. VR is an added benefit; they made the account system because they want businesses to use their business tools, but no-one was doing that apart from the niche businesses that already work directly with things on Facebook, because no business was to (1) store private data on FB's servers or (2) can recruit staff if they require them to use Facebook to work at their company.

[Asura]

The jump in visual quality looks great:

https://www.uploadvr.com/quest-3-graphics-upgrade-comparisons/

Meta have also confirmed that nearly all Quest games use dynamic resolution, so practically every game will get a resolution bump.

[MartyG]

Yeah, the upgrades look good and is likely to end up using more space due to better-quality textures. I'll mostly be using it for PCVR wirelessly, but I figured there'd be a space requirement increase on stand-alone titles, hence going for the 512GB SKU.

[Asura]

Yeah, the upgrades look good and is likely to end up using more space due to better-quality textures. I'll mostly be using it for PCVR wirelessly, but I figured there'd be a space requirement increase on stand-alone titles, hence going for the 512GB SKU.

I've ended up pre-ordering the 512gb from Amazon, with the intent to cancel one - either my 128 with Meta or the Amazon 512.

I'm leaning towards cancelling the Meta one. I honestly still feel miffed about the price gouging for the 512... But it's fair to say I'm a VR enthusiast and I think I can treat myself.