Can I access Quest 3's front camera?

The quick answer is "no". For privacy reasons, you can't directly access the images from the passthrough camera or the depth sensor to use with non-Meta libraries or custom programming. However, with the assumption that you are using Unity - the Meta SDKs offer MR capabilities through the Passthrough API. Basically - you add some components and tell the SDK to render your passthrough behind (or OVER) your VR rendered objects, and Meta does it behind the scenes for you without giving you access to the actual image/video/depth data. Here is a link to the documentation page for the passthrough feature in Unity:

Get Started with Passthrough | Oculus Developers

If you aren't using unity, you should be able to navigate the docs and learn about how to use it in other programming environments. I'm happy to give you more specifics if you still have questions.

To me this is a very important feature request, hope meta gives us access soon.

The privacy argument is not valid.

On android based systems (such as the one used for the Q3), the user has to give his permission for a specific app to use the cameras so this argument flies out of the window.
Now I'd love to know the real reason to why this essential feature is not yet implemented.

Can we get a reply from Meta about this? This doesn't any sense to me. I would also like to start working on computer vision applications using the quest 3. That's one reason I bought one...

We have a device that can do spatial tracking. What if I wanted to track against irl objects to power an application? This has many uses.

1. Track specific pieces on a VR tabletop game, showing information/animations on top of them.

2. Ask quest to 'track' an object you are holding and show you where it is afterwards. (universal, 'find this for me' app)

Is there an obvious alternative to these methods? Can we access the display data perhaps during a passthrough and use that for training computer vision models?

Fantastic news to see it finally arriving! I may have to wait to play with it though - part of this process is to manually add the permission to the android manifest file. Because of the way that Unity handles the android manifest, I've never been able to find good documentation on how to do this - I add the permission, but it's  always removed when building the APK. Anyone know what I might be doing wrong or have a step-by-step guide I can check out? Plus - if the device will only allow one attempt to set the permission (as xrdevbob suggests) - I'm sure I'll mess it up, and have to factory reset a bunch of times. 🙂