Back in the day when VR was all Fruit Ninja and Beat Saber you only needed to lie down after you had finished playing. These days with so many easy-going VR experiences like Headspace and the chance to watch movies via apps like Bigscreen and Virtual Desktop, sometimes you might just want to Quest 3 and chill.
Until now though that has been awkward as lying down made the Quest 3 beg for you to return to your stationary boundary, got all in a funk about looking up at the ceiling, and just generally didn’t play nice horizontally.
This has all changed with the rollout of the Quest 3 V64 software update which is currently being pushed out. This brings with it a new lying down mode to solve all these problems so let’s see how we get it up and running/
How to use Quest 3 apps while lying down
First things first you need to definitely be on v64, which there is every chance you are not. My personal Quest 3 is still on V63 and no amount of checking for new software updates in Settings will kick v64 into action. If the update hasn’t been pushed to your headset yet, you are just going to have to wait.
Next, and this is the slightly odd one, some people on V64 are reporting that they still do not have lying down mode, so what is going on there who knows but it will all be fixed up soon enough we are sure.
To see if the mode is available to you and activate it if it is, pop your Quest 3 on and head to the Settings App. From here find the Experimental Settings section and in here you can see all the goodness that is available to you.
If you have access to lying down you will see the option ‘Use Apps While Lying Down”. Toggle that on and your quest will now know the difference between up and down.
Eventually, this feature will come to the main version of the software but that will be in the future, for now, this is how you turn it on and off.
What’s new in Meta Quest v64
Besides lying down mode we are going to get better quality passthrough, less grainy, more vibrant colors and we should be able to read small text on our smartphones via Passthrough which is cool.
If you are still toying with getting a Meta Quest 3 you can read all about whether we think it is worth it or not right here.
Featured Image: AI-generated in MidJourney
