Meta Unveils Quest 3: A Sneak Peel Into Enhanced Mixed Reality Gameplay and Upgrades from Quest Pro

Published on June 3, 2023

In a grand unveiling, Meta has officially announced the arrival of Quest 3, showcasing its remarkable advancements in mixed reality (MR) capabilities.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, taking to Instagram, treated eager enthusiasts with a tantalizing sneak peek into the immersive MR gameplay experience on Quest 3, hot on the heels of its recent announcement.

The revealed video gives us a vivid glimpse into the world of Quest 3, highlighting its full-color passthrough MR mode. This innovative feature allows the headset to seamlessly blend the real world with virtual content, offering users a mesmerizing amalgamation of the two realms. From the video, we witness virtual objects adorning the walls, captivating our imagination with a mesmerizing undersea world glimpsed through a glass window, or a spine-chilling encounter with a zombie leaping through a window, ready to pounce on unsuspecting players.

While Quest 2 and Quest Pro have dabbled with similar concepts in the past, the new depth sensor of Quest 3 promises to take this experience to unprecedented heights, allowing for more convincing integration of virtual objects onto walls, floors, and even ceilings, all thanks to a meticulously mapped understanding of the environment surrounding the headset.

But the excitement doesn’t stop there. Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth himself joins the fray, demonstrating a mind-bending co-presence experience. In this thrilling showcase, both Zuckerberg and Bosworth engage in a virtual battle, all within the confines of the same physical space. The boundaries of reality are blurred as they venture into an electrifying virtual duel.

Delving deeper into the technological prowess of Quest 3, one notable aspect that stands out is the resolution of its passthrough mode when compared to Quest Pro. The footage doesn’t exhibit any discernible color fringing, which was an artifact of Quest Pro’s passthrough architecture, employing multiple black-and-white cameras fused with color information from a single RGB camera. This concern appears to be addressed in Quest 3, which boasts two RGB cameras, enabling stereoscopic capture of color data instead of monoscopic, as seen in Quest Pro.

Furthermore, the common occurrence of object warping, particularly hands, observed in both Quest Pro and Quest 2 passthrough, seems likely to be mitigated in Quest 3. This anomaly stems from the depth estimation challenges faced by computer vision in capturing near-field objects, particularly when they’re in motion. While it’s challenging to make definitive conclusions based on the current footage, there’s a strong possibility that Quest 3’s integrated depth sensor will significantly reduce such passthrough warping artifacts. Unlike Quest 2 and Quest Pro, which relied on computer vision for distance estimation, Quest 3’s depth sensor delivers more reliable measurements, empowering the system to render each aspect of the scene with heightened accuracy.

Interestingly, it remains to be seen if the previous issue of color fringing on Quest Pro will manifest in the same manner with depth. With a single depth sensor, the headset solely provides a monoscopic depth view, whereas it offers a stereoscopic vision of the real world. Presumably, this stereoscopic view will be projected onto the depth map, potentially leading to “depth fringing” around objects in close proximity, similar to the color fringing witnessed in Quest Pro.

As we eagerly anticipate further details, the unveiling of Quest 3 beckons a new era of mixed reality experiences, where the boundaries between the physical and virtual worlds are delightfully blurred. With its improved MR capabilities and potential resolutions to past challenges, Quest 3 is poised to redefine immersion and elevate our digital adventures to astonishing heights.

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