I tested the Meta Quest 3’s travel mode on a 15 hour flight and it puts the Apple Vision Pro to shame

Computex 2024 was easily one of my favorite shows in recent memory, but the 15-hour flight to get there isn’t great. I thought I had experienced long journeys in the past with a 7-hour excursion to New York, but this was a whole other level I wasn’t ready for.

And chances are you know the common problems – the choice of in-flight entertainment is stifled and looks even worse on that TFT screen, looking down on the entertainment you bring on the plane with you on a laptop or a Steam Deck creates pain right around the neck and not No matter how much you distract yourself, the environment of being on a plane can get really boring very quickly.

But when Meta announced travel mode ABOUT Research 3 and 2, I was intrigued (even skeptical) if it would actually make for a good experience. I’m burned by the Apple Vision Pro after all (more on that later), but I’m here to say that using Meta’s VR headset on a plane is a game changer for making over 6,000 mile trips fly by immediately.

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What is travel mode?

Announced a few weeks ago, Mode of Travel is a mix of things. First of all, it adjusts the motion tracking algorithms to accommodate all the expected movements of an airplane, such as turbulence. Second, the browser will now open the window to connect to in-flight Wi-Fi when prompted. And third (the one I didn’t test because my bosses wouldn’t let me splurge on business class tickets), a pilot program with Lufthansa to develop a suite of mixed reality content to own.

Since I didn’t really have Wi-Fi access to get fully online the entire way back to the bus (just watch the in-flight entertainment), I was limited to what I had stored on my device. So let’s consider this a test of what I’ll call “True Travel Mode.” By that I mean those who don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a luxury flight experience – just enough to get a seat in the back of the plane.

How to activate travel mode in Meta Quest 3 and 2

This can be done in three steps:

1. go to SETTINGS and scroll down to Experimental.

2. Scroll down this list of experimental settings and press the toggle button next to it Mode of travel to turn it on

3. Now you will find one Mode of travel option within you Quick settings panel to turn it on or off at your discretion

And that’s it! Just make sure you’re running v65 of the Meta Quest software and you’ll see this option appear.

Stopping a major disappointment

Before I discuss this huge step forward in in-flight entertainment for me, one key app recommendation – well, it’s more of a requirement for watching movies and TV shows, as there’s no online store or viewer to download and watch offline content.

Get Skybox VR Video Player, as the $9.99 price tag is worth what you get in terms of playing 2D and 3D video content locally in all kinds of video formats. And since your Quest 3 is viewed by your computer as an Android device when connected, simply grab your content (legally downloaded of course) and add it to the headset’s file structure. I ended up taking a few seasons of Silicon Valley with me, along with some games to go with it.

A revelation whether you are sitting or lying down

For the first time in a long time, I was lucky enough to get an entire row to myself. Normally, I’m cramped in a middle seat between two serial snorers, but I must have earned some good karma to actually make the two adjacent seats really recline and create a makeshift bed.

Whether I was lying down or sitting, the Quest 3 was virtually flawless in my time with it on the plane—provided you’re okay with a few dangling cables. Flights are noisy, so you’ll definitely need headphones, and the lag of Bluetooth headphones with the Meta’s headphones makes them unusable. And of course the battery life won’t last the whole duration, so a charging cable is essential.

But when you have them firmly behind you, the experience is unmatched. Screw that crappy screen you get on the back of the seat — transport yourself to a virtual cinema and watch to your heart’s content.

Even in moments where accurate tracking is essential, like playing Under Cover (basically a VR version of Time Crisis), everything felt great and I was getting accurate shots easily, even when the flight got a little bumpy.

I then turned my attention to productivity and opened Virtual Desktop (one of three screen mirroring apps that can actually work without an internet connection) to use as a virtual display for my M3 Pro MacBook Pro. I positioned the screen to sit directly in front of me, mimicking the seat back screen, and was off to the races typing my articles and editing video with virtually zero lag.

Of course, a more comfortable option for this kind of screen mirroring would be a pair of AR glasses like Viture Pro or Xreal Air 2, but eliminating the narrowing field of view of 50 degrees to 110 degrees wide is one. unlike night and day when it comes to seeing a second screen in your peripheral view.

Whatever I threw at it in the harsh environment of a flight, the Quest 3 held up without a hitch. The only setback was my eye strain, but after a short break I was right back.

How does this compare to the Apple Vision Pro?

When I traveled to Costa Rica, I had a chance to test the Apple Vision Pro in travel mode, and the results are very mixed. My colleague Katie Kozuch had a better experience, but with both of these thoughts in mind, I’m confident that the Meta Quest 3 is the clear winner for long-distance travel. Let me explain myself.

It all started with floating displays that work (mostly) well when in perfect lighting conditions, but the moment you challenge it when the lights go down for a long flight, you’re regularly greeted with a “Tracking Error” warning message. With Quest 3, I never encountered an error message – even when I tried to cheat by looking out the plane window!

Next, hand tracking is mostly fine about 7 times out of 10 during my in-flight use. There were some frustrations where my pins didn’t register, and while using your hands to navigate through VisionOS is already somewhat slow, you can imagine it’s even slower within the bumpy confines of an airplane seat.

Thanks to the simple addition of controllers, Quest 3 is infinitely faster to interact with. But even in the situation where you don’t have these, hand tracking feels much more reliable and accurate on the Meta’s headset.

And finally, a humorous observation when I wanted to go into the settings to turn off People Awareness. Upon opening the settings, I felt like I was losing my mind trying to find the settings screen, which turned out to be hidden under my seat. I’m not entirely sure what it was doing down there, but for lack of a better way to say it, Travel Mode could do with some work.

It’s worth noting that the EyeSight display on the Vision Pro helps give visibility to the cabin crew you’re watching. Every time I’ve had a crew member wave directly in front of my face, even though I was in pass-through mode — it requires you to take off the headset to talk to someone, whereas I didn’t need to do that with the Apple headset.

It makes me excited for the future

In the past couple of years covering headsets, I’ve noticed one thing: the parallel development paths between VR headsets and AR glasses are starting to converge. Don’t get me wrong, it will take a few years to get there as chip and battery technology has to catch up.

But it’s happening, and companies you’d think of in the AR glasses space are already experimenting. For example, a prototype I’ve heard about in conversations with a company already has a Snapdragon chip inside and a 70-degree field of view. The problem? These would cost about $5,000 to sell given the sheer amount of intricate custom engineering to make it work, and there’s no built-in battery.

This is where a VR headset really comes into its own for longer journeys, and the Meta Quest 3 stands head and shoulders above it in terms of Travel Mode capabilities – making its reasonable price tag all the more worthwhile. But Meta has also thought how he can condense his technology into a pair of glasses.

The promise is clear. If the Quest 3 can do this now, I can’t begin to imagine the progress that will occur when this technology is condensed into a pair of specs.

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