16 Meta Quest 3 Tips, Tricks, & Settings You Need to Know About

If you’re new to Quest 3 you’ll almost certainly want to capture screenshots and videos of your VR shenanigans to share with friends. Luckily this is easy with a shortcut you can do even in the middle of playing a game.

You can also take screenshots and videos with Voice Commands which we’ll cover… right now.

Voice Commands on Quest are a very helpful but highly slept on feature that will let you launch games, search the store, navigate your headset, capture screenshots & video, and more. Note: Voice Commands on Quest is only currently available to US headsets.

Tip: You can use Voice Commands anywhere in the headset, even in the middle of a game.

For the most part, Quest 3 is pretty good about understanding that setting your controllers on a flat surface means you want to start using hand-tracking. But sometimes it gets a little confused. There’s a shortcut to guarantee the headset switches from controller-tracking to hand-tracking, but you’ll need to enable it first.

When you capture screenshots and video on your headset it’s supposed to sync to your phone so you can access it through the Meta Quest app and share it from there how you please. In practice, media almost never automatically syncs for me. However, you can force individual captures to sync to your phone.

This is an incredibly useful feature which is the quickest and easiest way to turn on passthrough to get a quick glimpse outside of your headset (even in the middle of a game).

Just gently double-trap on the side of the headset (you can even tap it with your controller) and the passthrough view will appear.

By default, Quest 3 runs at a 90Hz refresh rate (which is how often the screen updates). For a smoother and lower latency experience, you can bump the refresh rate up to 120Hz.

Now the Quest menus should run at 120Hz be default, and any applications that support 120Hz will be able to use the mode too. Note that this may have a small impact on battery life.

Speaking of battery life on Quest 3, the headset has a built-in mode to squeeze the most power out of your headset.

Turning on Extended Battery Mode will reduce the brightness, resolution, and likely framerate so the headset does less work and consumes battery more slowly.

Meta offers a range of virtual environments for the Quest Home space and most use a 360 photo as their backdrop, but you can also use your own 360° photo as a backdrop.

Note that the default Quest 3 Home environment doesn’t show the backdrop (nor do a few others). Most of the environments will show your skybox but some give a better view than others, so experiment to find which one you like the most.

Its fun to share VR with friends and family. Since many different people might use your Quest 3, it’s nice to be able to lock specific apps so another person doesn’t stumble upon your Messenger chats, overwrite your game progress, or snoop through your browser history.

Now any time you launch that app you’ll need to put in your password before it can be used. Apps must be minimized or fully closed in order to lock after you use them. Sleeping the headset will not lock the currently active app.

Typing with your index fingers or laser pointers isn’t terribly fast. If you want to pick up the pace, you can enable a ‘swipe to type’ feature on Quest 3 that works similarly to what you see on many smartphones.

If you don’t see the option in Settings → Experimental, it may have been moved to Settings → System → Keyboard.

Now any time the system keyboard pops up, you can use swipe typing with either your finger or your controllers.

Whether you want to be in the headset and show something to people outside of it, or they’re in the headset and you want to be able to see what they’re doing to help them, casting is the best way. You can cast a video view of what’s happening in the headset to your smartphone or any web browser.

This will begin casting from the headset. The user inside will see a small light on their screen indicating that the headset is casting.

Usually when you decide to play VR you might need to do a little prep, like move a chair, take a swig of water, or fix your hair. Wouldn’t it be nice if the app you want to play could be loading in the background before you even put on your headset? Luckily that’s possible!

Sometimes you want to view a specific webpage in your Quest browser, but it would be a pain to type it into your headset by hand. Luckily you can open any URL from your phone directly in your headset.

Your interpupillary distance (also called IPD) refers to the distance between your eyes. IPD varies from person to person, sometimes considerably. For various reasons, matching the distance between your headset’s lenses to your own personal IPD improves comfort and immersion.

Your comfort in VR can vary drastically from one game to the next. Generally this is related to how much artificial motion an app employs. Games like Beat Saber—where you only stand in one place—tend to be comfortable for almost everyone, while games like Warplanes: WW1 Fighters—which have you twisting and turning in an airplane—can be uncomfortable for some.