Following the news that Meta’s Quest 3 received major mixed reality upgrades, including AI that can recognize furniture and improved pass-through quality, now one of my favorite Quest apps, YouTube, is getting even more. Improvements have been made.
This is because the VR version of the video sharing platform is the Quest 3, which supports 8K video playback up from the previous 4K.
To turn it on, make sure you’re running version 1.54 or later of the YouTube VR app, then launch a video that supports 8K, tap the gear icon, and change the resolution to 4320p or , if you want to change the resolution to 4320p, tap where it says 4320p60. I want 8K at 60fps instead of the usual 30fps. If 4320p isn’t an option on this list, then unfortunately the video you want to watch isn’t streaming in 8K.
There are some additional notes. First, even if the video supports 8K playback, it’s difficult to stream over weak WiFi unless you want to wait for buffering, so you’ll need a strong internet connection. Oh, there’s one more important detail. Quest 3 doesn’t have an 8K display. But that’s not as big a problem as you might think.
8K crazy method
The Quest 3 has two displays (one for each eye) that boast 2,064 x 2,208 pixels each. 8K resolution is 7,680 x 4,320 pixels. Even with the two displays combined, it still boasts just over 25% of the pixel count of an 8K display.
So, is 8K streaming pointless? Well, not completely.
For flat YouTube videos, it’s probably not worth playing at 8K on Quest hardware. The only advantage is that you will see a downscaled video. This is the opposite of upscaling, where a high-resolution source is played back at a lower resolution. This may provide a more detailed image than simply streaming video. The resolution will be lower.
The real improvement will be seen in immersive 360-degree video instead.
Simply put, when you watch a flat video, you see the entire resolution within that 16:9 frame. With 360-degree video, the resolution is spread across a much larger image, and only a portion of that image is visible depending on where you are looking. So if you’ve ever watched a 360-degree video in VR, 4K content may look like HD, and HD content may look blurry.
If you bump it up to 8K, immersive 3D video should look sharper because the section you’re watching is effectively 4K. So even though you won’t see 8K, you’ll still get a higher resolution.
This update could also be a great future-proofing update for the next meta hardware. There are rumors that the Meta Quest Pro 2 could up the Quest hardware’s display game, so it could get closer to his actual 8K display, but we’ll have to wait and see.
