My First Experience Working with Meta Quest 3

This weekend, I finally had the opportunity to try out the Meta Quest 3 for work. Taking advantage of some very atypical weather for January, I was on the coast. Normally, I bring a Macbook Air and an external monitor to work or research during the weekend. It was time to test the Meta Quest 3.

The App: Meta Quest Horizon Workrooms

I used the “Meta Quest Horizon Workrooms” app, which is still in beta. This app allows for a virtual room where other colleagues can connect and hold meetings that simulate an in-person encounter. You can sit in a room and project what you are seeing on your PC. Moreover, you can use a virtual whiteboard to sketch or highlight whatever you need.

Functioning and Battery Life

I haven’t been able to test the whiteboard function yet, but as soon as I find someone else who has the glasses, I will. What I have tried is the option of working with the Mac with 3 virtual screens. As you know, I have a strap with an additional 8000 mAh battery. This allowed me to work continuously for an afternoon, about 3 and a half hours. At the end of the session, the auxiliary battery was exhausted and the glasses’ battery was at 75%. Yes, the glasses consume a lot of power, we already knew that.

Experience and Issues

As for the experience, it was satisfactory. Despite working all afternoon, I didn’t have the sensation of eye fatigue. It also helps that the battery strap counterbalances the weight of the glasses (also called the visor). For the laptop and glasses connection, I used my phone’s own Wi-Fi (4G) connection. It actually worked quite well. A well-thought-out aspect is that when you connect the PC with the glasses, the audio also goes to the glasses.

However, there were some issues. Probably due to the limitations of the Macbook Air, during CPU usage spikes, the connection would cut out or slow down. Also, although there is some delay, it is not significant.

Areas for Improvement

I did not like that the Workrooms app does not allow moving the screens or hiding some controls. Another major issue is that if there isn’t much light, the tracking doesn’t work well. This means that you can’t use the glasses at night with low light, something that us developers usually like.

It’s also inconvenient that when you take off the glasses for any reason, you lose the connection with the PC and you have to wait for it to reconnect when you put them back on. Finally, the glasses hung once while I was wearing them, which made me dizzy.

Conclusion

In summary, I can say that I liked the experience and that I will repeat it. I also have pending the experiment of using the glasses directly with a Bluetooth keyboard/trackpad and connecting directly via VNC with my equipment. If this works, the laptop would stay at home. I’ll keep you posted!