James Cameron praises Quest 3 for its 3D movie experience
Will we be able to experience Avatar 3 on Meta Quest 3? Meta partner James Cameron praises the 3D movie experience provided by the headset.
In the latest episode of his podcast, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth talks with legendary director, CGI and 3D film pioneer James Cameron, creator of such films as Terminator, Titanic, and Avatar.
Last year, Meta announced a multi-year partnership with Cameron's Lightstorm Vision. The partners aim to produce high-quality stereoscopic content for Meta's VR devices over the coming years, and to facilitate access to the hardware and software needed to create such content.
VR headsets are better for 3D movies than most theaters
In the podcast, James Cameron praises Quest 3 (and modern VR headsets in general) as viewing devices for 3D movies because they solve many of the problems of traditional 3D technology in theaters.
Andrew Bosworth: One thing that has been interesting about our partnership is, you have such a high standard for the storytelling that you're doing, and how people experience the stories they can tell. And so for a long time, it wasn't obvious to you that these HMDs that we are building, were gonna be a thing that could do it. It seems to me like Quest 3 has convinced to you this is going to be a credible way to experience these rich narrative stories, right?
James Cameron: You know, the first time I put one on, I saw the quality of the image and the brightness of the dynamic range. And, of course, I knew, all of these MR devices have one thing in common, which is that they're creating a discrete left eye right eye image. So a lot of the problems that associated with stereo display in theaters, it automatically goes away. You're not giving one image to everybody and having it decode locally at the face with some form of glasses, polarized or shutter or whatever.
About the Quest 3 movie experience, the director says:
James Cameron: It's like a door opened for me, it was like the heaven's part of light shone down. There was an angel choir singing. It's like "Ah, this is how people can see the movie, the way I created it to be seen. Because the scale of the display is subjective, right? If you fill your field of view within the headset, and you're converging it out there on a distant plane, you feel like you're in a theater. I actually, I was just looking at some Avatar 3 material that we're going to share with some of the execs later this morning, and thinking "Wow, this looks great". This looks at least as good as Dolby vision laser cinema, which is the ne plus ultra in an actual group theater.
Cameron has seen Metas next-gen headset prototypes
As a Meta partner, Cameron is clearly promoting Meta Quest 3 here, but his enthusiasm for the VR cinema experience seems to be genuine.
Towards the end of the podcast, Bosworth and Cameron talk about headsets again. Cameron laments that traditional cinema is in decline with the rise of streaming and that many movies are no longer shown on the big screen. Cameron hopes that headsets will become an alternative to the classic cinema experience and says that he has been shown "new devices" from Meta.
James Cameron: Those films will always exist, but we're getting closed out of the type of films I like. All those filmmakers migrated to streaming, and now they're not getting the budgets, and the films aren't getting green lit for theatrical. That's why I'm hoping that, that maybe the HMD world that you're about to blow open over the next few years with some of the new devices that you shared with me - can I talk about that? I can't say anything about it except it's going to be very fucking cool.
Let's recap: Cameron says that modern VR headsets are great for watching 3D movies, and praises how Avatar 3 looks on the Quest 3. To me, that sounds like Cameron is teasing Avatar 3 for Meta Quest 3. It's not confirmed, of course, but it would be a great start to the partnership between Meta and James Cameron's Lightstorm Vision.
Avatar 3 is scheduled for release on December 19, 2025.
You can listen to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or with Meta Quest TV (in stereoscopic 3D, of course).
Would you like to watch Avatar 3 with Quest 3? Join the conversation on Facebook, Bluesky or X or share your opinion in the comments below.
For feedback, topic suggestions, or other ideas, please email us at hello@mixed-news.com.
Note: Links to online stores in articles can be so-called affiliate links. If you buy through this link, MIXED receives a commission from the provider. For you the price does not change.
