One if my kids wants a Meta Quest 3 for his birthday, and I am only vaguely familiar with VR hardware, and on top of that I’m wary of everything Zuckerberg.
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How are the ecosystems? Does the choice of brand lock you in or out of particular titles? I suspect his main goal is to play gorilla tag and similar.
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Is Metaquest 3 an objectively good/decent product? What are some viable alternatives?
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He’s got a decent phone and a half-decent PC. Will the same headset work for both?
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How much HPU (if any) is required to drive one of these decently?
EDIT: He’s looking at the 3S version. Looks like 3 is more in line with steam frame. His birthday is mid-march.
The Quest has its own ecosystem of native VR games that run directly on the device. You need to create a Meta account to use the headset. However, it’s possible to sideload apps to it and you can stream PCVR games to the Quest.
As of right now, the Quest 3 is a decent-choice hardware-wise, probably the best in terms of pure value and it has the largest userbase. The big downside is that it’s made by Meta. It’s also a bit of an unfortunate time to buy a VR-headset, as it looks like the upcoming Steam Frame will be a better choice, once it releases. If your kids birthday is still a few months away, it might be worth waiting for a bit before buying anything. It’s completely unknown when the Steam Frame will release though.
Something like a Pico Neo 3 could potentially be an alternative if you want to avoid Meta. For purely PCVR, there is also the Valve Index, but that’s more of an enthusiast-level device that requires a more complex setup using base stations for tracking.
The PC should work. It doesn’t stream phone games.
GPU I assume? Well, for one thing, it can run games standalone, though those games won’t have impressive graphics. For PCVR streaming, I’d recommend at least something like a 1070, preferrably something much better.