I am watching a 3D video of my family at Thanksgiving, a clip I’ve watched many times since Apple’s Vision Pro entered my life. Shot with an iPhone 15 Pro, my mom is there, looking at me across the table, my son and nephew nearby, and my sister getting food ready. It almost feels like I’m there. And then, I looked at my favorite dioramas as prehistoric life at the Museum of Natural History, looking at them like I was standing near the tank and peering in. But this time I’m not in the Vision Pro: I’m wearing the Meta Quest 3.
While some have already found ways to view Apple’s 3D spatial videos in Meta’s VR headsets, Meta officially added a way to see them with the Quest’s next v62 OS update. I’ve gotten a chance to try an early build of the OS on the Quest 3 and look at my spatial videos shot with the iPhone 15 Pro, and it works. It’s not perfect, but for the $500 cost of a Quest 3 versus the $3,500 for a Vision Pro, it’s a pretty great alternative.
Spatial videos will also play on the Quest 2 (which costs just $250 now) or the Quest Pro, but I wanted to see what Meta’s highest-res VR headset of the moment would feel like against Apple’s bleeding-edge micro-OLED 4K screens.Â
Spatial videos already feel a bit low-res and fuzzy-bordered when seen on Vision Pro; the video recording limit is currently 1080p at 30fps. In a 4K headset, that means captured moments already seem a bit less crystal-clear than in real life and contained in a limited border. Meta’s Quest 3 plays back videos in a similar type of slightly fuzzy frame but less aggressively blurred at the edges than Apple’s zoomed-in playback mode. I couldn’t grab any screenshots, unfortunately, because Meta’s screenshot mode blacks out the video content (Apple’s doesn’t).Â
In the Quest 3, videos had a bit of stutter sometimes, which keeps them from looking 100% smooth. That…
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