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It’s been a while since I’ve worn a virtual—sorry, mixed reality headset. I have the Quest 2 at home, which I haven’t used as much lately since most of my computing is now from a foldable Android device. But, my demonstration with the Meta Quest 3S at Meta Connect made me reconsider whether there’s a place for this kind of experience in my life. I just wish it didn’t make me queasy.
Meta announced the Quest 3S headset starting at $300. It’s slightly more affordable than the regular Quest 3 and runs on the same Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 platform. What you save in money, you lose in resolution, as the Quest 3S doesn’t offer as wide a field of view. Still, it’s higher than what it was in the Quest/Quest 2. Meta seems to be positioning this release toward people like me who haven’t put on their headsets in a while and might consider an update. It offers a full-color mixed reality passthrough, and I could move myself easily during my demonstration by simply flipping it to that mode.
At the beginning of my time with the Meta Quest 3S, I was convinced I missed this experience. But by the end, I remembered why I don’t pick these things up too often. I get nauseous. I don’t know if the lack of food or the intense heat was helping drive the feeling, but about 32 minutes into my demo, I politely asked to tap out and take the headset off so I could breathe in the real world.
What sent me over the edge was Horizon World’s Music Valley Experience. It features Sabrina Carpenter, who is a mere child to me as I used to watch her on the Disney Channel, crooning in the distance. As you approach her “stage,” your view gets more immersed in the show, to the point that it virtually feels like you’re encroaching on an actual person’s territory. It was a little too close to Sabrina for me.
At one point, another avatar entered the area and started dancing with me. This person was sweet about showing me around the virtual playground. We moved over to a hovering alien spaceship doling out music notes. I had a hard time grabbing them with the joysticks as my claw mechanisms, and it was during this activity that I started to feel it in my stomach.
I had success with other parts of the Quest 3S’s experience. I watched the beginning of the Celine Dion special on Amazon Prime. She sounded great. I sat in a field of daisies in an 8K, 3D YouTube video. It was chill. I moved around some windows and poorly stacked them for the hell of it. I tried to play an Xbox game, but the demonstration controller wasn’t working. I did manage to hop into Just Dance, but by that point, I was nearing the end of my tolerance.
The sickness hit the heaviest in Horizon Worlds because it lacked a stable horizon, the kind that you can stare at to help equalize you on a rocking boat, for instance. However, I didn’t expect that reaction while sitting in a chair. That’s likely all I will do the next time I don a headset: sit down. Meta may have figured out a way to dial down the price on the Quest. But it must still figure out how to sell sensitive stomachs like mine in virtual and mixed reality.
The new Meta Quest 3S starts at $300 for 128GB of storage and goes up to $400 for a 256GB variant. You can preorder it now, though it’s officially on sale October 15.
