Quest 3 Unboxing Reportedly Leaked Ahead of Fall Release, Video Here

I have the vive DAS on the quest 2 and it’s great

Just to add an opinion from the other side – as a “person with hair” (I actually had very long hair until 2022) I never ever purchased all those fancy straps (really don’t like the design of all those custom things) and was using only the default one + on the second year of headset’s life in my hands I also bought a plastic “bowl” for 5$ on a famous chinese site just to try it out – and it worked really great and made it even more comfortable. I played thousands of hours like it, even in something very active like Beat Saber, Blade and Sorcery (outdoors) or Contractors with a lot of movement and rotation + my shortest session usually was about 2 hours. The “secret” is pretty simple – you need to tighten it up very much (on the very borderline of comfort, the good sign is when after playing you have an Oculus logo on your face clearly visible so even your relatives notice it). Also I think that head’s shape/size also matters to some extent, but for me personally default strap was very good and I don’t plan to change it on the Quest 3 either (though now I will definitely buy this plastic “bowl” for Q3 stap as soon as it will appear because it did a very good job on balancing some of the Q2 weight and with smaller Q3 it should be just perfect).

That’s the one thing we should have understand from the Bigscreen Beyond: soft straps can be very comfortable, IF the facial interface fits well. In this case the bone structure of the face will hold the HMD in place and also carry the weight of the HMD, and the soft straps work well by evenly distributing the force needed to press the HMD against said bone structure. Meta only delivers one type of facial interface, which will have been designed to fit the largest possible number of users with some tolerance thanks to the padding.

Things look very different if the bone structure differs too much, usually causing a lot of pressure at one particular position. In my case the cheek bones seem to protrude too far, making any HMD I’ve tried very uncomfortable. Since the facial interface doesn’t get the full contact as intended, I have to choose between a bad and loose fit that uncomfortable, but not painful, or a very tight straps that press the HMD firmly against the face (mostly the cheeks), but that becomes unbearable after a few minutes. This then leads to looking into all types of alternatives that allow removing the pressure from the face, be it a stiff strap, counter weights, very thick padding or halo strap designs like the Quest Pro that allow to use the HMD without a facial interface by moving most of the weight to the forehead. At least if again the bone structure there fits the construction of the HMD.

So I think that the whole discussion about fixed vs soft straps is mostly a misconception what the problem actually is. The straps function is only to support the facial interface that actually holds the HMD in the right position, and depending on fit users either need a strap that actually works for the well fitting facial interface or tries to replace the holding function for a badly fitting facial interface.

Meaning the Quest 3 will have similar issues to the Quest 2. The soft strap will work for the vast majority of users, as the facial interface is designed for an “average” bone structure, but users with differing skull shapes will have either limited comfort or need to find replacement solutions. The way out of this is already known with individually created facial interfaces, but this adds a lot of costs and makes sharing the HMD harder. We’ll see in early 2024 how well Apple’s approach with individually fitted paddings from a selection created for different head shapes will work out.

This should be rather easy to replicate for either Meta or a 3rd party provider, and maybe the strange situations where people hate or love either soft or stiff straps, but rarely both, will just go away once we have a way to ensure everybody can get a good facial fit to begin with. The fact that there have been zero hacks to add something like the Elite strap or DAS to the Beyond clearly shows that the strap isn’t the actual issue here.

Meta provide a standard, narrow and wide version, but these are basically all the same, just stretched along the x-axis. That’s not sufficient to deal with problems like elevated cheek bones, for these the actual curve has to be different.

Bigscreen posted some interesting facts about their individual facial interfaces. Some people have very weird head shapes, e.g. two eye sockets at different heights, or one/both eyes further inside the skull. These are visually barely noticeable, but 2mm difference may mean that with a standard facial interface, almost all the weight ends up resting on just one side.

Apple said they 3D scanned 4000 different user heads to come up with their set of paddings. I assume they properly tested these, so whatever number they offer will be a good indicator for a reasonable number of different padding shapes a HMD should provide for face and back of the head to cover most of the user base. People with significant asymmetric or untypically shaped heads will still have to resort to individualized offerings, and technically a company like VR Cover should have no problem to offer individual facial interfaces for the Quest 2/3 the same way Bigscreen does, requiring a 3D scan and then carving either the padding directly or a mold for a foam padding with a CNC router. The material costs are a few bucks, the question is mostly if the market is large enough to pay for the required development.

Interestingly the most comfortable HMD I ever wore is still a Cardboard I created myself 2014, simply because it was glued together out of cardboard, foam and some soft straps, all of which were not only very light, but also allowed to trim them with scissors in an iterative process until they exactly fitted my face. So maybe all we need is someone to offer a facial interface for the Quest 2/3 with way too thick padding that comes with a pair of scissors, so that every user can cut off tiny pieces of foam until their individual perfect fit is achieved.