Your Meta Quest 3, or 3S, has access to the latest Horizon OS update (v81), accompanied by serious upgrades to your Horizon Home digital experience and major changes to multitasking in VR or MR.
First, your virtual Meta Horizon Home options have been replaced with a single premium space with four decor choices: Horizon Central for a futuristic city skyline, Midnight for a nighttime view of the plains with the Northern Lights in the sky, Valley for a view of a majestic landscape, and Oceanarium, which moves your home deep underwater – and even invites guests ocean creatures in your space.
Space is now easier to explore with much more freedom of movement, and there’s a new Instagram window you can activate to display your choice of image or video from Meta’s social media platform.
You can also decorate your space with anchored windows. Simply open a window – say YouTube in your browser or TechRadar’s homepage – and on its toolbar (which is usually below) you can select a new docking option.
This will not only freeze the window in space for that session. Let’s say you leave your VR house and jump into a game for a while, then leave again. When you return, you will see that your window is exactly where you docked it.
You can dock three windows in your VR home and three in mixed reality for a current total of six.
Productivity Improvements and More
Beyond docked windows, this update also delivers a serious productivity boost in the form of more active windows. You can apparently have up to 12 open at a time, but I tested it, as did UploadVR, and currently we’re only stuck with the usual limit of six (three free-form floating and three open in each of the default positions). This could be a feature that comes once v81 is a bit older.
Windows 11 Remote Desktop is supposed to be an experimental feature, but unfortunately, that’s not currently the case either. Again, this may be a change that happens as part of its own feature rollout rather than the initial v81 launch.
Another change we’ll have to wait for is QuickPlay, although that’s not Meta’s fault.
This update will let you access a new VR game before it’s fully downloaded – something you can do for multiple games on your PS5 and Xbox Series X – but it won’t work unless the developer enables it.
I can see this being handy for a big VR title like Shadow of Arkham where it doesn’t matter if only the first half of the game was downloaded because the second half should have been downloaded long before you could access it.
More upgrades
This update is important. I still have many more features to use, like adding PCVR games to your quest library.
These will appear if you have set up and used Quest Link to play PC games on your Meta Quest 3. Now, assuming your PC is set up, these games can be launched from your headset, just like a standalone VR title.
There have also been some security improvements with the Worlds security system, which will remind you to reuse or create appropriate boundaries for your VR games. The Horizon feed should now show you a better selection of curated content, and Meta AI’s logic is also supposed to better understand what you mean – so if you say something is too loud, it should understand that you want to turn the volume down.
This is a serious upgrade for your Quest headset, and the update should be ready to install if your Quest 3 or Quest 3S hasn’t already downloaded it.
