What features should Meta Quest 4 have for the upgrade from Meta Quest 3 to make sense?
Meta Quest 3 is undoubtedly a high-quality device, but it has its limitations. I’ve been analyzing for a long time what really needs improvement for us to experience a truly immersive sense of presence in the virtual world.
A 110° horizontal FOV is already good enough that we don’t feel like we’re looking through a tunnel. 25 PPD is also sharp enough, at least at closer distances. 90 FPS is perfectly sufficient for smooth and comfortable gameplay. The pancake optics are very sharp, and aside from occasional lens flares, I’m satisfied with the quality. That’s not to say these parameters shouldn’t improve, but they’re no longer the critical factors for a high-quality VR experience.
What truly degrades presence, however, are the LCD panels. Blacks appear more like dark gray, and brightness is rather weak. This obviously also affects color richness and accuracy, dramatically reducing the sense of immersion. Even a flagship title like Half-Life: Alyx cannot truly shine. Meta Quest 3 allows software contrast adjustment, but this comes at the cost of losing detail in dark areas, which is also very painful. However, when I set the contrast to around 33% and started the game from the beginning, in those parts of the scene without dark areas, I had a strong sense that the space in front of me really existed and even experienced a “wow” moment. It was at that point I realized that no amount of higher PPD or other improvements could solve this.
The SDE is practically invisible now, at least in games, and no longer interferes. The human eye is extremely sensitive to contrast and light, so the only solution is micro-OLED displays. In my opinion, if Meta Quest 4 doesn’t have well-calibrated micro-OLED panels, upgrading from Meta Quest 3 isn’t worth it.
We all want a super-powerful headset, but I also realize how crucial high-quality content is, and that’s the stumbling block for today’s headsets. There’s no point in increasing parameters that are already considered good. It’s better to invest in a more powerful chip and better content. Most native games on Meta Quest 3 aren’t even rendered at full resolution, and the higher-quality titles still dynamically reduce resolution in other parts of the scene to maintain performance.
The most painful part is that to completely eliminate aliasing and other visual artifacts, strong TAA combined with sharpening filters and FSR must be used. This results in a soft, low-detail image. To get as close to the original as possible, pixel density must be set to 2, meaning rendering four times more pixels—absolutely insane in real time. Fortunately, eye-tracking gives us hope, allowing high-quality rendering only in the small area where we’re looking, while the rest of the image is displayed at much lower quality, dramatically saving performance. To fully utilize the 25 PPD that Meta Quest offers, this is absolutely necessary. There’s no point in increasing PPD; the only thing that matters is improving display and content quality. Eye-tracking is, therefore, for me, another necessity for the Meta Quest 4 upgrade to make sense.
What are your thoughts on this?
