What is the best headset for VR immersive experiences?

The release of the Apple Vision Pro has caused quite the stir, both with consumers and our industry. We’re so excited by this new competitor for Meta’s Quest 3. Why? Because the more players that enter the VR space, the more creators will be pushed to innovate, and the bigger the strides in this technology will be.

We’re fortunate to have both the Apple Vision Pro and the Meta Quest 3 in our London office, allowing us to explore the ways each can be used to create immersive experiences. So, let’s take a closer look at how these two devices stack up against each other…

Content

The Apple Vision Pro boasts best-in-class resolution per eye on the market. It combines accurate eye tracking sensors with clever rendering techniques so that you are always seeing the best in quality image. But it’s more than just eye-candy – it’s the excellent passthrough quality that opens up a world of creative and practical applications. Apple has given us the toolkit to use the headset’s amazing spatial memory in placing items around you as well as applying real-world lighting onto content for that blur between realities.
As for the Meta Quest 3, it is much more versatile. This is largely down to the number of tools available to enable content creation such as Unreal and Unity. This allows us to be more varied in our content output. Where budget allows for lower fidelity, you have that option as well as hyper-realistic, high-fidelity content.

Interactivity

The Apple Vision Pro’s hand and eye tracking capabilities are spectacular, providing a single user the ability to smoothly navigate through an experience. However, it’s pretty solitary as an experience goes, and whilst it’s well-suited to passing around an office or at home, we don’t yet have the capability for shared experiences. What this means is that you can’t have multiple users viewing the same objects in the same space in real-time. Despite this, the Vision Pro has massive appeal to the multi-user experience, and it isn’t difficult to imagine this blossoming in the near future.
Shared experiences have long been a key part of Quest 3’s heritage, with its extensive library of interactive offerings in gaming, education, and enterprise. Again, navigating through interactive experiences is fairly effortless; the hand tracking is extremely impressive and well refined from years of development, and we’ve not found much need for the controllers other than when playing games.

Pre-visualisation

There are currently no integrations for the Vision Pro for Pre-visualisation. However, it’s not difficult to imagine the amazing capabilities for visualisation, especially with the Vision Pro’s spatial recognition capabilities. An interesting use case for this would be to leverage location-based AR and turn up to a construction project, put on a headset, and be in a space that’s not yet built and navigate it seamlessly as if it was.
With the Quest 3’s Open VR integration, you can plug the headset in and harness the hardware power of anything you plug it into. You have a direct link into real-time tools such as Unreal, Unity, Notch, and disguise.

Workflow

With the Vision Pro being new, the visionOS framework is still in its infancy, but Apple has provided robust support for Unity on launch. There have also been rumours of experimental support for Unreal Engine in the near to mid future – but this is not officially confirmed. However, one challenge with this fixed hardware is that more developer integrations are required to optimise for it, so you’re facing a longer overall development and testing phase.
Whereas with the Quest 3, developers can use a wider range of real-time toolsets thanks to adoption of OpenVR, an API which unifies development across various headsets. This also means that you’re not limited to the processing power of the headset – you can plug into a powerful PC and experience much richer content.

Who’s winning right now?

I think across the board the quest 3 can be viewed as the more versatile product and is well suited for budget conscious campaigns. Whereas the perception of the vision Pro, with its Apple label and high price tag, its value sits more within premium implementations; especially in terms of its high-fidelity content and the cost associated with optimising for the Apple hardware.
Ultimately, Apple shows us that making huge strides towards seamless mixed reality adds so much to the magic of immersion… but a solitary experience only goes so far.
There’s certainly an argument to say that with hardware that is more accessible, and a platform that’s more established for creating shared experiences, the Quest 3 becomes a more compelling solution for creating scalable experiences with breadth and longevity.

The future?

If we briefly look at the future, it’s obvious that once Meta adds eye tracking and improves on passthrough blending in its headsets, they could double the price and still be 80% as good for less than 50% of the Vision Pro’s cost.
Apple being new to this space though, they could well catch up, and with shared features and rumours of a lower cost headset coming, they could easily improve their hardware accessibility.
It’s exciting to see the future in mixed reality taking shape.