So, what is it that made the Quest 3 make me see a different future? A truly magical once in a lifetime experience. As soon as you first turn on the Meta Quest 3 the normal first-time user experience menu comes up to set up an account or connect to Wi-Fi or whatever, I thought no big deal and started going through the menus. Then it hit me. The menu I was looking at was floating in front of me in real life. The painting on the wall in my house was behind it, there was the desk under it, the carpet, chairs, other people, pets, everything. I had known all about “passthrough” from the Quest 2, in certain situations its enabled so you could see the world around you in a blurry black and white way, mostly used to help you set up safe area boundaries. I understood the Quest 3 and more advanced headsets had color and better-quality video on their passthrough. What I didn’t expect was that it was at such a level where it could be the default state and felt so natural that it actually tricked my brain into thinking I was really seeing “through” the headset into the real world. Putting on the Quest 3 is not like looking into a VR headset, it feels looking through glasses.

Welcome to the world of Spatial Computing. I dismissed it as another apple buzz word when they revealed the Apple Vision Pro, which everyone mostly just laughed at because of the price. The thing is, the Meta Quest 3 passthrough vision is good enough to trick the brain, but the magic spell is revealed after a little more time when you start to notice you can’t pick up small details, you can ALMOST read text on a screen or book for example, but that is where it starts to break down. I think Apple had to make something that costs an insane amount of money in order to fully get there. And they are just barely getting there, with a lot of compromises, such as a big wire sticking out the back, and the screen on the front projecting an avatar of the user's face. Surely this is just a way to be the first to this market and that they are working towards some technology to make the glass clear and see through.

What is so great about “getting there” in this case? We could always predict a future where they are as lightweight and comfortable as a pair of Oakleys, only they can also project AR or go into full VR like the Quest 3 does. Why not? We don’t have the technology yet, but its easy to imagine if you try. My epiphany was that eventually you will either be able to see extra stuff laid over the real world, or you won’t. When it gets to the point where there are no compromises, why wouldn’t you have an overlay that shows you exactly how much of an ingredient you are pouring in the kitchen, and also how long everything has been cooking for, and a recipe book, the list goes on and on just in the kitchen! It is easy to brainstorm how Cooking alone would be completely transformed, the same would be for sports, navigation, movies, games, everything.

Why should the data we receive from computers and the internet be limited to screens? Even just sitting at a desk working on a monitor, why not be able to slide Slack over a couple more inches to the left, and have your music playlist over there, moving everything exactly where you want, not being confined to the exact monitor size and dimensions? Your desktop is the actual desktop. It is going to be like the productivity boost from going from one to two monitors, but infinitely more flexible.

It's going to take a long time, but this belief I had my whole life that everyone would be ok with going “fully” into a digital world cut off from the rest of reality, it just isn’t going to happen. That is going to just be one minor app, basically an Xbox or Steam app for those fully immersive fantasy action experiences, some people won’t even mess with that. Like when the iPhone got rid of buttons and made the entire screen a blank canvas, the future shaped by this technology is not something we step into, but a canvas of infinite possibilities laid on top of the real world around us, ready to be painted with our dreams.