Five ways the Meta Quest 3 will (let developers) change the game

theverge.com:

By Sean Hollister, a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission. See our ethics statement.

On Wednesday, Meta didn’t announce an obvious killer app alongside the $499 Meta Quest 3 headset — unless you count the bundled Asgard’s Wrath 2 or Xbox Cloud Gaming in VR.

But if you watched the company’s Meta Connect keynote and developer session closely, the company revealed a bunch of intriguing improvements that could help devs build a next-gen portable headset game themselves.

This is the obvious one, but it’s also stunning to see just how much better the same games can look on Quest 3 vs. Quest 2. A lot of that’s thanks to the doubled graphical horsepower and increased CPU performance of the Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2, though there’s additional RAM, resolution per eye, and field of view as well:

At the top of this story, check out the increased render resolution, textures, and dynamic shadows of Red Matter 2. Below, find a similar video of The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners.

I’m not saying either game looks PS5 or PC quality, but they make the Quest 2 versions look like mud! It’s a huge jump.

First, virtual Zuck didn’t have legs. Then, he had fake legs. Then, last month, Meta began to walk avatar legs out — in the Quest Home beta, anyhow. Now, Meta says its Movement SDK can give you generative AI legs in theoretically any app or game, creating them using machine learning if developers want to.

Technically, the headset and controllers only track your upper body, but Meta uses “machine learning models that are trained on large data sets of people,