It turns out that the Meta Quest 3 and Valve’s Steam Deck may be a secret match made in heaven. The new Meta Quest 3 headset combined with Valve’s handheld is a surprise visual treat.
While the Steam Deck isn’t powerful enough to run VR games, it can be used as an augmented reality monitor for traditional games. Imagine the NReal Air but instead of glasses, it’s a headset, and instead of being crap, it’s quite good.
Users on the Steam Deck subreddit showed off their combination of Valve’s handheld and Meta’s new headset, and it looks incredible. With the headset’s brilliant augmented reality passthrough allowing you to pin virtual monitors in front of you, users are playing their Steam Deck on huge screens in front of their face.
One user showed off gameplay of Armored Core 6 running on Steam Deck via their Quest 3. Using Immersive App, the Steam Deck’s display is streamed to the mixed reality headset, allowing the user to experience the handheld on a huge screen anywhere in their house.
The Meta Quest 3’s augmented reality passthrough is a huge new feature that has been barely advertised by Meta. While the feature was just as good — if not better — on the now-defunct Meta Quest Pro, its presence on a much cheaper headset is remarkable.
While the Meta Quest 3 isn’t doing so well sales wise, especially compared to its massively successful predecessor, the headset has been well received by fans and critics alike. Unfortunately, the new headset may have some adverse impact on game sizes for the previous headset, but it’s a large step forward for mixed reality hardware.
The Meta Quest 3 is now available to buy online or in-store. Meta’s new headset costs £479.99 for the 128GB unit and £619.99 for the 512GB model.