Enjoy VR on Planes: Meta Quest Devices Now Function Above Ground!

Virtual reality headsets can be great for travel, especially with movies, but the latest headsets don’t always work as expected in moving vehicles. Meta is now trying to fix that with a new Travel Mode on the Quest 2 and Quest 3.

Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Quest headsets, announced a new Travel Mode feature today. The feature allows you to use a Quest 2 or Quest 3 headset in an airplane for watching movies, web browsing, or any other applications or games. The person in the seat next to you probably wouldn’t like you swinging your arms around in Beat Saber, but there are many other games and applications that work well with minimal movement.

Meta said in a blog post, “Travel Mode turns Quest into the ultimate in-flight entertainment device, so you can watch movies on a massive virtual screen, kick back with a game or meditation app, and even get some work done in private. And thanks to our headsets’ balanced, ergonomic design, you can enjoy it all comfortably, no neck pillow required.”

If you want to try out Travel Mode, you need to opt into the feature from the “Experimental features” section of the Settings app. It will then appear as a toggle in the Quick Settings menu. If the plane has a Wi-Fi network, the Quest might recognize it as an airplane network and ask you to enable Travel Mode.

Meta

Older and more basic virtual reality headsets, like the Oculus Go and Google Daydream, usually worked fine in airplanes and other vehicles. However, newer headsets have more complex motion tracking with six degrees of freedom (6DoF), which can mix up the movement of the wearer with the vehicle movement. The previous workaround for Quest headsets was to turn off headset tracking entirely from the system settings, but that also prevents many games and applications from working.

The main catch is that Travel Mode only works with airplanes right now, as the company “specially tuned our algorithms to account for the motion of an airplane.” The company plans to add support for trans and other modes of transportation in the future. Also, not all games and applications work without an internet connection—Travel Mode might encourage more developers to improve offline support, though.

Source: Meta