How to Watch the Paris Olympics on a Meta Quest 3
The Olympics are better in virtual reality.
If you’re not fortunate enough to be in Paris for the Olympics this month, the second best way to watch the games is through a Meta Quest 3 headset, where you can watch Peacock’s coverage of Olympic events in either a virtual theater or on a augmented reality screen. You can stream everything Peacock is offering from its app on the Quest 3, and that means a ton of live events, archived competitions, re-caps, highlight collections, and more.
How to watch the Paris Olympics on Meta Quest 3
Here’s how to watch the Olympics in virtual reality with a Meta Quest 3:
Navigate to the Meta Horizon Store.
Search for Peacock
Download and install the Peacock app
Sign in or sign up: Peacock's premium plan is $7.99 a month and includes ads. Ad-free Premium Plus is $13.99 a month.
Once the Peacock app is open, Olympics coverage should be front and center. Click the "Olympics" tab and go to town.
How good is Olympics coverage on the Meta Quest 3?
I gave Peacock's Olympics coverage a spin this morning, and I enjoyed having a floating window streaming coverage of the preliminary rounds of a sport I know nothing about while doing real life things—the Olympics are great background entertainment for household chores. Here's what it looks like when you watch women's rugby while doing your laundry, for instance:
The full-screening room experience is great for my favorite use of VR video: lying in bed and projecting video onto the virtual ceiling. This more-lazy-than-sitting-on-the-couch style of watching things may turn out to be the killer app of virtual and augmented reality, and the Olympics are your opportunity to give it a try.
Another use for the VR Olympics is being able to watch a different sport than everyone else in the house. You can slip on some headphones and project equestrian events right on top of the TV that's showing gymnastics, and still be (kind of) hanging out with your wife and watching the Olympics "together."
Sadly, Peacock's VR coverage of the Olympics is limited to 2D streams of the content that's available on their app, so it doesn't take full advantage of the possibilities of VR with immersive, 3D, sideline coverage of Olympic events or anything like that. Here's hoping for something like that for 2028.