We finally know why there is no eye tracking on the Quest 3
Without a doubt, Meta is the king of the VR space right now. The Quest 3 is absolutely among the best VR headsets ever made and the company just so happens to own, and manage, the biggest library of VR games and apps on the market.
And that means a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t mean that the Quest 3 is perfect. It isn’t as comfortable as people expected it to be and Meta still has tons upon tons of work in the field of UX to make the headset more approachable by a wider demographic.
Oh, and it doesn’t have eye tracking: something that the Quest Pro and even the PSVR have. And, obviously, something that the Apple Vision Pro has made a selling point out of. And fans kept asking why again and again, until they finally got a more substantial response.
Some of you may already know how pieces like this go: this one comes, as per tradition, straight out of an Instagram AMA with Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth. And in the spirit of said tradition, Andrew got asked — once again — about the lack of eye tracking on the Quest 3.
Quite the elaborate response, right? But let’s break it down. Essentially, Bosworth quotes three reasons related to the lack of eye tracking on the Quest 3:
We’ve heard the first reason before, because — as previously established — this question is a regular during Andrew’s AMAs. Considering the technology’s partial presence on the Quest 3, I’m honestly interested in how much of a price increase it would’ve led to, but that’s something that we’ll probably never find out. Food for thought, though.
The second is only to be expected, but while I can appreciate the scientific thought behind — what in my mind is — a couple of grams offsetting the ergonomics of the entire headset, I’ve got to say: the Quest 3 is already uncomfortable to most people and they’ve had to go out and buy an extra headband anyway. More brain food, I guess.
Lastly, plain and simple: “additional challenges” doesn’t really mean anything, does it? This could be related to any number of things, but most importantly: if the lenses presented a challenge, then how did Meta overcome said challenge on the Quest Pro, which is equipped with pancake lenses and offers eye tracking already? And since that happened, how come it didn’t translate into a learning opportunity for the Quest 3?
Ah, so many things to ponder.
And that means a lot of things, but it certainly doesn’t mean that the Quest 3 is perfect. It isn’t as comfortable as people expected it to be and Meta still has tons upon tons of work in the field of UX to make the headset more approachable by a wider demographic.
Some of you may already know how pieces like this go: this one comes, as per tradition, straight out of an Instagram AMA with Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth. And in the spirit of said tradition, Andrew got asked — once again — about the lack of eye tracking on the Quest 3.
If you look at Quest Pro, certainly there's some raw cost to it and some weight to it in terms of just the extra cameras, the lights that glint off of the eyeballs that you can actually track the direction of the pupil and so on and so forth. But the system cost is also big. Then you have this extra computation that's running, you have this extra processing that's happening… Calculating the foveated rendering is actually, itself, not cheap. And you have to make sure that the savings you get is big enough to offset the calculations. It's worth noting that doing it through our current lenses, our pancake optics, presents additional challenges relative to the more conventional optics that we've had before. Apple solved this by going through the lens, but that's why they have to have inserts, and they don't support glasses, and it doesn't work for all prescription types. So there are a lot of trade-offs in this space.
— Andrew Bosworth, Meta CTO, February 2024
Quite the elaborate response, right? But let’s break it down. Essentially, Bosworth quotes three reasons related to the lack of eye tracking on the Quest 3:
- Cost, and therefore a price increase, which Meta didn’t want for the Quest 3
- Increased weight, which would alter the entire way the Quest 3 feels
- The Quest 3’s pancake lenses presenting “additional challenges”
We’ve heard the first reason before, because — as previously established — this question is a regular during Andrew’s AMAs. Considering the technology’s partial presence on the Quest 3, I’m honestly interested in how much of a price increase it would’ve led to, but that’s something that we’ll probably never find out. Food for thought, though.
The second is only to be expected, but while I can appreciate the scientific thought behind — what in my mind is — a couple of grams offsetting the ergonomics of the entire headset, I’ve got to say: the Quest 3 is already uncomfortable to most people and they’ve had to go out and buy an extra headband anyway. More brain food, I guess.
Ah, so many things to ponder.
But ultimately, the status quo is the same: the Quest 3 doesn’t have eye tracking and it’s doubtful that Meta could release some sort of magical firmware update, which enables it. Still, the demand is there, and I think that when the time for a successor comes, eye tracking will be on-board from the get go.
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