The first thing you’ll likely notice about Meta’s new Quest 3S is that it costs only a few hundred dollars, not many hundreds (or thousands) like other virtual reality headsets. The price stands out, because the Quest 3S arrives only a few months after Apple’s Vision Pro—a heavy and buggy $3,499 VR headset—was released to disappointing sales numbers.

Instead of appealing to developers and early adopters with deep pockets, as Apple tried to do, Meta wants its headset to appeal to more casual users. For them—the newbies and the VR-curious—$300 is a much more attractive price. (That’s for the 128 GB of storage space, by the way. Add another $100 if you want the 256 GB model.)

Those casual users will be greatly pleased. The Quest 3S does exactly what it’s supposed to do; it functions slightly better than the Quest 2 that it replaces but not quite as well as the Quest 3. While I know this is not what Meta intended, it sure does feel like the S in the name is meant to stand for “sweet spot.” Meta has created an affordable headset that delivers thrills without fuss, making the Quest 3S the thing that might get a lot of people (me included) into VR at long last.

Same but Different

Photograph: Meta

Though the 3S repurposes many of the parts from the Quest 2, the new headset makes some changes that put it a step above the budget model before it. In place of an invisible touch-sensitive button on the side of the Quest 2 headset that triggers video pass-through that lets you see your surroundings, the 3S has a dedicated button on the bottom of the headset. Directly next to it is a volume switch. Using tactile buttons to control these basic functions feels more reliable than double tapping the side of your headset, which never really worked perfectly.

Resolution is 1,832 x 1,920 pixels per eye, still lower than the Quest 3’s 2,064 x 2,208 resolution. The 3S uses different optics than the Quest 3’s pancake lenses, which usually offer a clearer view than what you see on the 3S. The fresnel lenses on the 3S can cause more fuzziness to appear at the edges of your vision. It took me lots of adjusting the straps and lens tweaking to figure out the optimum viewpoint, but once you get there, the rest of the experience becomes relatively straightforward.

Bring Me the Horizon

Photograph: Meta

Meta’s hardware is really just a vessel to draw people into its library of games and its own VR metaverse, Horizon Worlds. Horizon Worlds feels more lively than it has in the past, but it is not yet the thriving social hub Meta wants it to be. A typical trek through the different worlds of Meta’s verse will include bouts of absolute emptiness, loading screens to get from place to place, and, when a room is populated, the energetic shouting of packs of very loud children who seem to be everywhere. It’s not exactly my scene.