being in tech

F and I got the new Meta Quest 3 devices and I wanted to write down my initial thoughts. There are already a ton of reviews out there of the popular games so I won’t spend much time on that although I will mention some apps that I thought were pretty good.

Last time I tried anything VR was with the Quest 2 and I only really played beat saber there.

Piano vision is really fun although the tracking is still not quite accurate. I haven’t had a chance to test it extensively but I have tried to connect it to my physical keyboard via a pc and it works okay. I was able to upload some custom MIDI on to the headset and play that instead of the stock classics. I need to get a printer cable with USB-C so i can use it without the PC otherwise the setup becomes quite bulky.

Big Screen Beta was a fun way to hang out. The idea is great, but there’s a lot of work in progress still. I tried hanging out with my brother who’s in the Philippines and tested out running Disney+ for example since we both had subscriptions. For some reason, it didn’t work to sync the videos, probably because the group watch functionality isn’t available yet for him. Regardless, the environment was pretty fun, we could take selfies of our avatars and draw stuff in 3d space. It was a decent environment for socializing at least.

Then my brother gifted me the table tennis app which was also fun as it let you place a ping pong table in mixed reality. Really fun, I just need to practice a bit more. I can’t really play ping pong in real life, much less in VR although I do feel like i would have a better chance there.

I have a few other apps that I want to try out, but it really does seem like there are now more apps available out there that I would actually spend some time on. I really want to try out the fitness apps but i think we need to acquire the silicon facial interface otherwise the default one will just get nasty.

One major gripe I have though is the lack of real family sharing in the store. Apparently, if your household has multiple devices and you want to share apps with each other, you have to have a main purchasing account that should be the admin account for all devices and then you can add individual profiles into the devices and share apps with these users.

I feel like it’s a very awkward model since I would want to be the admin of my device and my husband of his. We would want to be able to share apps with each other and other members in our household. If we take the real life analogy, if we both had separate xboxes and purchased our own physical games, we would have been able to swap games and play them on our own consoles. I really hope meta figures out and fixes the whole app sharing mechanic. Especially if they are aiming for a cheaper model next year, there will be more and more households that will have multiple devices as they get cheaper, and as people upgrade.

Otherwise, I am pretty excited about the types of apps and socializing that is enabled by the Quest 3. I just hope they fix the app sharing and maybe work on making the device more comfortable to wear. I still get pain on the cheeks and forehead after wearing the quest for an extended period of time.

I hope to write more updates as I use it more.