Meta is removing the ability to see phone notifications on your Quest

Meta is discontinuing a characteristic that allows you to see notifications out of your smartphone when you’re utilizing a Quest VR headset, in keeping with the patch notes for the Quest’s v60 replace. The corporate launched the power to see iOS and Android notifications within the headset in 2021.

Meta didn’t elaborate additional within the patch notes about why it’s eradicating the characteristic, and it’s a disgrace that it’s doing so. With out these notifications, it’s troublesome to know what’s taking place in your smartphone once you’re totally immersed in your Quest except you pull the headset up out of your eyes — which forces you to cease what you’re doing in your Quest.

That mentioned, if in case you have a Quest 3, the headset’s full-color passthrough is sweet sufficient to see your smartphone’s display screen for light-weight duties like skimming notifications. However my colleague Adi Robertson mentioned that studying telephone screens on the Quest Professional was “nearly inconceivable,” and in my expertise, the Quest 2’s grainy black-and-white passthrough is a horrible technique to try to have a look at your telephone.

Whereas it’s disappointing that v60 is taking away a helpful characteristic, the replace is including some good new issues, too. There’s a brand new format utility app that “helps you spatially measure, align and visualize actual world objects straight in your bodily area.” Quest profiles will present “details about your shared experiences and connections” once you go to somebody’s profile (although you possibly can select to maintain that data personal). The Quest Professional’s CPU and GPU will get larger clock speeds once you’re in blended actuality functions, and you can also make your cloud backups end-to-end encrypted by including a PIN.

You’ll be able to learn the complete particulars of the v60 replace on the Meta Quest weblog and within the detailed launch notes. The replace is rolling out now, although Meta says that when you don’t have it but, it “must be in your digital fingers quickly.”