Will quest 3 ever get its own seperate update?

General Discussion
1

im pretty confident that the quest 3 can handle most pc worlds/avatars but the devs haven’t yet made a version of vrchat for specifically quest 3 users. which is a shame because there are so many cool and unique worlds to explore on vrchat but the vast majority of them are only accessible to PC.

i can understand if it’s not possible at the moment but i would really like to know why that is.

is it simply cause the quest 3 can’t infact run these PC worlds/avatars?

or is there another reason?
would making different versions for different android devices be too technically advanced?
would deeply appreciate any kind of answer

2

Two reasons!

First, you can’t just load PC content on the Quest.

It isn’t that the Quest 3 can or can’t “handle” PC content – it’s that it is literally incapable of opening or using it!

When you package up an avatar or world, Unity has to know what system it’ll be running on. Depending on if it’s for PC or Android (Quest), it has to be packaged in different ways, with different layouts, with different programming built into it.

So, if you tried to load a PC world in a Quest 3, it’d just say “I don’t know what this is.” Same would happen if you tried to load a Quest world on a PC.

Think of it like loading a Playstation 4 disc into an XBOX 360. Sure, a game might have versions for both consoles, but you can’t interchange them. The company had to customize the game for each console, so they have different discs that don’t work in the other console.

It isn’t about performance, really – but, if you get into the technical weeds a little bit, the way the Quest’s graphics card (slightly inaccurate, the GPU is built into the same package that the CPU is) is quite different from PC graphics cards. They draw things in different ways that make them inherently incompatible.

I’m simplifying a lot, but that’s generally it for why you can’t just load a PC world on Quest.

Second: why don’t creators build for Quest in addition to PC?

It’s hard!

The Quest 3 is powerful, but it is still leaps and strides behind even the low end of modern desktop PCs. A good way to think about it is that laptops are about 4-5 years behind desktop PCs in power, and phones/mobile devices are usually about 8-10 years behind desktop PCs.

So, you have to do a ton of optimization to fit into that tiny little chip. Textures have to be greatly reduced in size. Worlds can only be about a quarter as large in actual physical size. Certain shaders and graphics simply don’t work (or cost way too much to use). Code has to be tightly optimized and carefully crafted. Not to mention you have to leave a ton of performance headroom for the terribly optimized avatars people tend to wear. :sweat:

That’s a lot of work; for some, they don’t want to do it and it doesn’t give them value. Maybe they’re just here to experiment on their own terms with the freedom that PC lends them, or maybe they just don’t really care to maximize the number of people visiting their world. Maybe their vision outgrew the Quest from the start. Maybe they don’t know any Quest users, and don’t really have a motivation to build for them. Or, most commonly – maybe they just don’t know how to optimize for it!

It’s a tough problem for everyone. It isn’t done out of malice.

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Quest devices run on Android, it has 8GB of RAM while Quest Pro has 12GB of RAM while it technically could handle those worlds the makers of the worlds decided to only make it available for the Windows platform since Android has a ton of constraints.

4

this response was extremely informing and i think i completely understand why now.
thank you very much!

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You’re welcome! It’s a pretty complicated subject, so I never blame anyone for not understanding. I’m glad I could help!

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So what your saying is vrchat has the same problem as Minecraft, bedrock and java they don run together or understand each other. You would have to complete rework something for it to work on one or the other

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It’s similar in that if you make something to target bedrock, it won’t just work on Java.

Am I correct in the assumption that even a texture pack would need to have a separate version for Java and bedrock? I know for minecraft there has been a lot of work to bring the two versions together.

But yes in general two versions that come together and become a thing.

8

hmm, is it possible that face and eye tracking will work in vrchat on the standalone version of Meta Quest Pro? It’s just that VRChat is a huge social platform where I would really like to express my real emotions

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There used to have eye tracking native integration from the Meta SDK, but it got removed for performance or (i don’t remember) stability issues. So now the situation is more on using OSC for anything related to advance external communication like this.
Maybe they would think about it in the future but never saw that discussed or planned in any roadmap.

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The Meta SDK implementation was very slow and dropped 10-20 FPS (on top of the already-low FPS Quest 2/Pro users are used to) even if you weren’t using eye tracking. In addition, very very few users used it (on the order of 1-2 dozen) and the amount of development time we were spending on it to make up for the SDK’s issues was not worth it.

So, it was cut.

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Thank you for your answer, we continue to believe in the future! I think and hope that headset manufacturers, including Meta, will definitely focus on conveying real emotions into the game, including VRChat.