One if my kids wants a Meta Quest 3 for his birthday, and I am only vaguely familiar with VR hardware, and on top of that I’m wary of everything Zuckerberg.

  1. How are the ecosystems? Does the choice of brand lock you in or out of particular titles? I suspect his main goal is to play gorilla tag and similar.

  2. Is Metaquest 3 an objectively good/decent product? What are some viable alternatives?

  3. He’s got a decent phone and a half-decent PC. Will the same headset work for both?

  4. How much GPU (if any) is required to drive one of these decently?

EDIT: He’s looking at the 3S version. Looks like 3 is more in line with steam frame. His birthday is mid-march.

  • Blaster M@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17·
    11 days ago

    Right now: Meta Quest 3

    If you wait a few months: Steam Frame

    Quest 3 is standalone, and runs VR games on the headset, or with Steam Link and good wifi, you can play VR games from your PC on it. Caveat, you need a Meta (Facebook) account to use it.

    Quest 3, not the 3S, uses pancake lenses, which is the big advantage compared to older headsets in comfort and clarity.

    Steam Frame is going to be the better, will also play Standalone, but is designed to connect to a PC, including its own wireless link that doesn’t need to use your wifi router. Requires a Steam account. Caveat, you need to wait a few months for it to be released.

    Steam Frame has a better-specced design that is intended for its purpose of VR gaming headset, and Valve doesn’t track you like Meta does.

  • StudioGloom@lemmy.world
    12·
    11 days ago

    Tbh- I find this timing real unfortunate. Steam Frame is coming out in a few months and I find it’s open source software compelling as well as the hardware in general - I am also wary of the Zuck. That said, it’s not ready yet so that info doesn’t really help you.

    1. Ecosystems, for now, the meta quest 3 is one of the most popular headsets on the market. So it is fairly well supported, even if meta just laid off a bunch of their VR people.
    2. Price to performance for what I understand the Zuck is wallet tanking the market so it has great price to performance but will fall significantly short of the performance on the much higher end.
    3. I can’t answer this I haven’t looked into phone VR enough
    4. The meta quest is capable of being standalone, but if you were to drive it from a PC instead the GPU power would vary by title. Gorilla tag wouldn’t take much, but cyberpunk would be a bit difficult.

    I am answering as someone who has recently become interested in VR so anyone else can feel free to correct me or educate me as well.

    Good luck finding the right device for your kid.

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
    4·
    9 days ago
    1. Ecosystem is closed, you buy a quest you need to buy from Meta and have your Facebook account linked.
    2. It is good, and objectively currently the best (and only) standalone headset.
    3. The Quest is a standalone headset, he doesn’t need the phone. He can plug it into his PC, but that’s not the main intended use and there are some quirks.
    4. Not sure what you mean, but like I said the quest is a standalone headset, so nothing else needed. If you want to run it connected to a PC it would require fairly decent hardware for it to be worth the bother.

    All of this being said, and like others have told you, we should be getting the Steam Frame somewhere in Q1, and it’s objectively better in all those points:

    1. Open system means you can’t be closed onto one garden. Although Steam is a lot easier.
    2. It’s theoretically comparable with the Quest 3
    3. Frame is also standalone, but it’s also designed to be wirelessly connected to PCs using it’s own designated bandwidth, making it much better at that than the Quest.
    4. While PC is the same for both cases. The streaming experience should be a lot better with the Frame due to improvements to the way the content is streamed that Valve has made.

    All of that being said, the Frame WILL be more expensive than the Quest. IMO, it’s worth to pay more for an open platform, but you might look at things differently. Also you should consider that we don’t know when it will be available and how much it will cost, but I’m confident that it will be a better purchase regardless if both of you can afford the wait and price.

    Personally I bought the Quest 1, and while I don’t regret it, I got fed up with lots of the Meta stuff. I plan on buying a frame on release, and would only get a quest if it was given to me for free since I don’t plan on spending a single cent more on that platform.

  • MuttMutt@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    10 days ago

    Personally you need to decided what features are important to you. From my understanding anything connected to Meta requires logging into Facebook to use. For me that is a big no not to mention that I’m a linux user.

    https://vr-compare.com/ is a decent place to start looking around and get an idea on what you need to look for.

    I’ve seen a few things that are interesting but so far nothing has ticked all the boxes to make the purchase happen.

  • Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world
    2·
    11 days ago

    I bought a Quest 2 before Meta took over the company, and have recently started using it again after letting it collect dust for a while.

    I totally understand not wanting to sign up for a Zuckerberg product, but the Quest is probably one of the easiest VR setups. Just log in and go. No wires connecting you to a computer or worrying about whether or not your setup can handle the games you’re trying to run.

    I’ve heard the Quest 3 is much better than the 2, but I have no experience with the 3.

    Again, Meta deserves whatever hate they get, but I have to admit the Quest environment is nice and easy to work with.