Speaker 1: Apple’s Vision Pro Headset has been around for weeks now and Met is Mark Zuckerberg just appeared on Instagram to talk about how the Quest three compares to the Vision Pro. I bet you know his answer, but I’ve been looking at these headsets for a while and I’ve worn the Quest three for quite a long time. So how are these different? Which one is better? I can help you with that. First of all, on cena’s best VR headsets, there is a winner. It is the Quest three. There are a lot of reasons for that. At $500 [00:00:30] compared to $3,500, this is the one that’s affordable. Plus these conceptually do similar things. How they execute them is pretty different. These are both VR headsets with mixed reality capabilities. Apple wants you to think about the AR side of things. Meta wants you to think about VR and ar, but they both work by using external cameras that show pass-through of the real world and bring it in to your VR headset to blend the virtual and the real. Speaker 1: How do these [00:01:00] both feel aware? Well, you have to get used to wearing a VR headset. They both have a weight on your face. The Quest three, especially with some of its extra straps like this one, I feel like fit on my head and balance much better. The Vision Pro is heavier, notably a bit heavier and a more top heavy in the front. If I put on this dual loop strap, it feels better, but also you have to bring around this battery pack, which has a hard time figuring out where it wants to be. Now there’s things that these have in common, like mixed reality, but the way they’re used, games and fitness [00:01:30] and things like that, work and videos, you can already see that they’re diverging. Let’s get into it. So the Apple Vision Pro and the Quest three both have pass through cameras that show the real world. Speaker 1: Hello, I can see you now. The Apple Vision Pros cameras are a lot higher quality. I can see things pretty crisply, but not the same as my everyday vision. It still looks like I’m kind looking at this through a camera feed. I definitely see motion blur. I definitely see lower resolution, but you can actually look at it with me. I mean, [00:02:00] it’s good enough that I can take a look at this book, for instance, that Stanley Kubrick and I can definitely read it, but I can take a look at my phone for instance, and I can take a look at CNET on my phone and I definitely can read things. Would I want to be doing this all the time? No, but it’s definitely usable if I need to in a pinch, check my watch, flip through, things like that. And that’s the whole idea is that when I also bring up apps here [00:02:30] and I’m doing stuff and I also take a look at things down here, I can feel like my world is still around me, but it’s seen through a camera. Speaker 1: So the Quest three also has pass through video. There’s definitely a lower camera quality here. That being said, it’s still good enough to see the world around you reasonably okay to function. Like if I need to know where my phone is, I need to know where my controllers are. There’s definitely some distortion, but it’s color. It’s much better than the Quest two. And even if I want to look at a book, you can’t tell in this camera [00:03:00] capture what it looks like in my eyes, but it still looks pretty okay. I can totally tell these are pictures from The Shining. I can make out the captions and the little footnotes. And again, I can check my phone here reading an article on cnet. Hello David Carnoy. So I can do that too. On the Quest three, the only difference is that the display is lacking that extra crispness. Speaker 1: Now, the way that the mixed reality works is a little bit different. They both use depth [00:03:30] sensors to scan and mesh the world around you potentially being able to mix the virtual and reel with physical objects like furniture and walls. Meta asks you to go through a room setup first to lay out the space. Apple does it automatically, no room setup at all. Now Meta has games and apps that can recognize things like walls and play around with the landscape a little bit. Apple’s not doing that that much even though it has the capability for the most part, apple is just layering flat [00:04:00] screens and objects over what you see, but they can even kind of go through walls. There is some heads up display awareness in both when you’re getting too close to objects, but these both have the capability to start blending things more down the road. Speaker 1: Apples is higher res metas. Quest three one though is functional. Let’s talk about hand tracking. So right now I’m doing hand tracking on the Apple Vision Pro. One thing I really like about hand tracking on this headset is that it works with your eyes. What that does is it saves [00:04:30] a lot of time on gestures. I can look around at icons and I can be able to tap on one and all I have to do is look at it and tap and I don’t have to actually reach over and tap. So if I do this right now, I can look over it only on Vision Pro and Tap my hand is nice and lazy. It can even keep it down on the side and do that, and it makes browsing a lot easier because I can just interact and do things without having to reach up like you do on the Me Quest sometimes with hand tracking. Speaker 1: Now, [00:05:00] what I don’t like on Vision Pro with iron hand tracking is precision. If I open up Safari here and I open up a website, some of these smaller icons on the webpage are a little hard to focus on. If I look at more, click on that, I’m looking at some of our other sub things on our site. Space biology. I’m finding I took a little moment to get onto climate versus space and I accidentally clicked space and I meant to get climate. So that’s frustrating. The more tiny [00:05:30] icons that you have to interact with here, it can frustrate my eyes and I feel like Apple needs to improve the eye tracking on this to make that work better. And now let’s talk about the Meta Quest three. Now the Quest three comes with controllers, which are great, that have buttons and allow to interact with things and play games and control the interface. Speaker 1: We could also use hand tracking. Now, meta hand tracking does not have eye tracking, so it’s only recognizing your hand motions and sometimes it doesn’t kick in. I put down the controllers and I’m waiting for it to kick in. Now it’s kicking in [00:06:00] and you can interface with things. Meta’s language is a little bit different and sometimes a little bit buggy. I can tap this that brought up my interface and I can see things. Now I can reach out and drag windows just like I can on Vision Pro, but you need to reach out, interact a little more, and if you want to control things, you have these pointy circles that kind of appear like pointers from your hands that you’ve got to aim and scroll. You can still do the pinch [00:06:30] and scroll gestures, but you have to keep your hand up a little higher than on Vision Pro. Speaker 1: And sometimes it’s a little hard to nail the clicking there. It’s definitely not as seamless as on Vision Pro, but it works. If you don’t like it, you can always go back to using the controllers. There are already hundreds of games on the Quest three. It’s a game console. You can play them in VR and also in mixed reality. Right now I’m playing Racket Club, which I can finally play in a large dimension [00:07:00] space that’s bigger than my home sets up basically like a pickleball court that I can see you, I can see the room and I’m playing an active racket sport game right here with a virtual opponent. Speaker 2: Oh, come Speaker 1: On, got Speaker 2: That, Speaker 1: Got a little racket in my hand. The feedback is great, it’s super responsive Speaker 1: And you just can’t do this on Vision Pro. So I [00:07:30] mean, this is what my kids love about VR on the Quest and it’s what I love about VR on the Quest and there’s a lot of games. So let’s start Supernatural, which is a fantastic workout gaming type of experience, which has dance moves and boxing. So it tracks heart rate. I can do all sorts of exercises in here and it’s really been my go-to, and Apple, surprisingly has not gotten into fitness yet on the Vision Pro, certainly not like this, although I imagine at some point they might. And this one’s like a bat based dancing one. Speaker 3: [00:08:00] You get those feet wide. Speaker 4: Everybody in the club right now, Speaker 3: We’re going squat straight into a lunge. Speaker 4: You need to get the Speaker 3: Arms between the thighs as we squat. Speaker 1: So it’s not that there are no games on Apple Vision Pro, it’s just that the variety of games is a lot less, especially at launch right now. Actually one really fun one that is one of the early interesting weird games on Vision Pro is Black Box, which basically has these little mysterious puzzles [00:08:30] and you kind of got to tap them with your fingers and figure out what exactly is going on. Now I’m going to try to tap this one, which I played before. Now I’ve got this sparkly thing I have to turn to. Okay, a little dizzy from that. I’m going to do that and make the ball recenter on my hands. Goodbye floating bubble. So this has [00:09:00] some interesting hand tracking things. I want to see more stuff like this. The closest I could find to a fitness game on here because it is possible, is Synth Riders, which is on Apple Arcade. And my hands have these balls that are floating on them and I’m going to play along with the music. [00:09:30] I mean not bad, especially for a first gen effort, but I’m really thrown off that I feel like I can’t get any feedback from what I’m controlling, even though I can see the glowing balls Speaker 1: That I’m controlling with the music. So it’s possible that there could be active games for this. It just doesn’t seem like a priority and I’m a little worried about the speed of the hand tracking. You can kind of see that it’s a little laggy right now, [00:10:00] although I’m also doing camera capture, so who knows? Speaker 1: Alright, so that’s sent the writers. If you’re going to spend $3,500, the one thing this is going to do is play movies and TV shows and videos spectacularly. So you can play a lot of different movies on this just like you can on Quest three. But the quality of the micro O led display here, the vividness of it, the high res quality of it, it just feels like a movie [00:10:30] theater. It feels cinematic and vivid and you’re not even going to see that in the capture that I record here, but in my eyes it feels that way. So I can play this video in a nice big screen that I can stretch out here to pretty large dimensions, bigger than my field of view. And there’s also an environment, one where I can pick a cinema and sit here in a [00:11:00] movie theater type thing and it looks great and I can change my location from front to middle to back to floor view if I want to sit in the front floor level. Not a ton of options, but there are some. And also I can see my hands when I’m in video mode, which is cool. I can check the time and feel like I’m [00:11:30] not totally closed off. So yeah, you can play back spatial videos obviously on Apple’s headset where they’re intended just like I did on Quest recording some videos. This is for my own purposes because it’s 3D Speaker 2: 3D, Speaker 5: It’s for a new mobile Speaker 1: And yeah, I’m being swept up a lot more by it. This feels larger, it feels more like it’s present, it’s coming into my space. Everything’s bigger [00:12:00] and more vibrant and that just makes it feel more immersive. Yeah, I just kind of want to watch everything like this. My colleague Bridget Carey felt the same way when she saw it. It’s one of the best features about the headsets, like headphones for your eyes. There are a lot of videos you can play on the Quest three headset. The only difference is that the display resolution and quality isn’t quite as good still. It’s good enough if you want to be able to view a few things, especially for the price. So you can access things like YouTube in the browser. Right now I’m looking at cnet. [00:12:30] I can play a recent review of headphones and if I want to blow this up to full screen, I can do that. Speaker 1: And right now I’m looking at C Net’s video on a nice big screen and I’m talking to you just like the Vision Pro. Again, the trade off is that the video quality here is totally fine, but it’s not as good as a great [00:13:00] TV or cinema experience. Whereas on the Vision Pro I think it is. So it’s a matter of degree, but you can definitely play this on a big screen. And there are things like Amazon Prime Video, there’s Netflix, there aren’t as many streaming video app choices, but you can look at your spatial videos and I’ll show you that now. So I’m actually going to take a look at a Thanksgiving memory that I looked at on Vision Pro and it’s my mom. I’m just recording some video. My mom, this is for my own [00:13:30] purposes because Speaker 5: It’s 3D, it’s for, this is a new mode. So I’m seeing if this feels like I’m there Speaker 1: Later. Yeah, so I see my mom, I see my family. The video is a little bit choppy, so it’s not as smooth as it was on Vision Pro. It doesn’t look great, but it looks viewable and it looks immersive. It looks like I’m singing across from my mom. It’s not as good as Vision Pro, [00:14:00] but it’s nice that it’s in here as well. Speaker 1: What is working on a computer like with a Vision Pro? Well, there are two different ways you can do it. First of all, you can work on your Mac and you can cast a big monitor of what you’re looking at that can be sized in different ways. So I’ve got my MacBook here projected. I could put it up here or float it down here. You can only do one monitor though, unlike MedQuest three, which I’ll get to in a moment, you can just [00:14:30] do one screen at once. Everything looks nice and crisp. And what I like is that I can lean in and well, it told me I’m getting too close to my laptop, but you can lean in and get details on things or bring the monitor nice and close and it looks nice and crisp. You can also do this on the Quest three, but the quality of this display is much better. The other thing you can do is because it’s running iOS, you could bring up other things next to it. Like, Hey Siri, open Apple Music. Speaker 1: [00:15:00] And now I’ve got my music library playing and I can play something there. Or Hey Siri, open Apple tv and I could play something there. I find that when I’m working in this mode and everything’s connected, I feel like I’m actually working in an extended Mac or Apple computing space and it’s pretty nice. Alright, now let’s get some work done in Meta Quest three. You can do that, you can get work done on the Medi Quest three. It’s not as easy as Apple Vision Pro, but it costs [00:15:30] a lot less. And there are a number of apps that will do it. You can use meone desktop app. I actually like using Immersed and I’m going to use Immersed right now. I got my back here, but I have two monitors look at that I can actually extend to across both monitors. So that’s cool and very useful. Speaker 1: And you can curve your displays around some of the interface. Things are a little wonky here. I’m working in an immersive environment, but I can also tap my hand [00:16:00] and get a mixed reality and now I can see the whole world around me with the laptop so I can see my keyboard and yeah, you can do work on this. So is it as nice as the Vision Pro? No, but I like the fact that this works and that you could actually basically do work on the Quest three for $500. Now, the one thing you can’t do here is open up additional apps beyond this. [00:16:30] Now, right now I’m in Immersed, I’m in Immersed environment. I certainly can’t open up any iOS apps. Your mileage is going to vary working on the Quest three and I think it’s really fine as an extension to your PC or your Mac, but it’s not going to feel as ultra hooked in as the Vision Pro does. Speaker 1: And now let’s get to something you might not have thought about sharing. Assuming you got one of these, you probably only have one and you might think about sharing them. Well. The Apple Vision [00:17:00] Pro is really tough to share. First of all, it doesn’t work with glasses. You have to have your own prescription lenses. It also has different fits, different types of headbands, different face mask pieces, which could be fine, but they might not fit perfectly to other people’s faces. Apple’s sharing process is also much more complicated. Each person in guest mode has to do their eye and hand tracking setups before they start and there’s no easy way to start and end a stream to monitor what they’re looking at. Apple has airplay that can drop out and there’s [00:17:30] no dedicated app to start that. The meta quest is really good for sharing. It allows multiple accounts. Speaker 1: It also doesn’t have any restrictions on glasses. You could put your glasses inside of it and there is a Meta Quest app runs on iPhone, it runs on Android, and you can take a look and manage what that person is demoing. You can start an app from in there. You can watch their stream, cast it onto your phone, you can reposition and recenter their view for them. So I find that’s great if you’re demoing it for someone who hasn’t done VR before, [00:18:00] I love that ability. I feel like it’s designed for that. Apple needs to really catch up on that. So if you’re looking to share something in your house with a lot of people, this is the one. So what’s the best mixed reality VR headset right now? I mean, that answer is really easy. It is the Quest three, and that’s because of its price and its overall feature set. Speaker 1: If you consider it a game console with lots of other benefits, the ability that it could do work, that it could do these other things, it could do fitness for you. It’s shareable. That’s a lot in a little package [00:18:30] that’s really not too expensive. That doesn’t mean that the Apple Vision Pro is not a fascinating product. There’s a lot of things that it does, particularly in terms of video playback and its multitasking and the possibilities of pushing computing in this platform forward that are really, really interesting. But at that price, $3,500 and with a 1.0 type of experience with its software and apps, it’s something that you definitely want to see what it’s going to evolve into. Unless you’re somebody who wants to test drive the future, if you’re ready to buy [00:19:00] into that and live with that weirdness and the fascination points too will then go ahead. Speaker 1: But definitely just try a demo first before deciding to buy one. This is a lot easier to recommend to buy because the Quest has been around for several generations now and Oculus has been working at VR for about 10 years. So this is a pretty polished product for what it is, even if it has experimental edges around it. That being said, the landscape is going to change right now. These things look like VR headsets with mixed reality benefits. At some point we’re going to get towards [00:19:30] glasses that we might be able to wear all around in the world, but we’re not there yet. So we’ll check back in on this as it goes. This is round one of looking at Meta’s headsets versus Apple’s headsets and comparing them. If you have questions or comments below, please provide them and tell me what you think. And thanks for watching.
