VR Photography: How to Take Great Photos and Videos in VR

Nobody talks about VR photography and I think that’s a missed opportunity. The screenshots I take inside VR environments — sunrise over a virtual mountain, the neon glow of a Beat Saber corridor, a perfectly framed moment in a story game — some of them are genuinely beautiful. And mixed reality capture, where you combine VR content with real-world surroundings, is its own fascinating art form.

Here’s how I capture stuff in VR and turn it into content worth sharing.

Basic Capture on Quest 3

Screenshots

Hold the Meta button and press the trigger on either controller. Done. Screenshot saved.

Or — and this is better — say “Hey Meta, take a screenshot.” Voice command means you don’t have to interrupt what you’re doing with a button combo.

Screenshots save at the headset’s render resolution, which on Quest 3 is 2064x2208 per eye. The actual saved screenshot is a combined view that looks like a standard photo.

Video Recording

Same menu — Meta button, then the camera icon, then Record Video. Or “Hey Meta, start recording.”

Default recording is 30fps at 1024x1024 resolution. It’s… okay. Not great. The internal recording is compressed to save storage space, and 1024x1024 is low compared to what you actually see in the headset.

To improve quality: Go to Settings > System > Camera and increase the recording resolution. You can bump it to 1920x1920, which looks significantly better. The tradeoff is larger file sizes and a very slight performance hit.

Mixed Reality Capture

This is where it gets interesting. Mixed reality capture uses the Quest 3’s external cameras to film your real environment and composites the VR content into it. So viewers see you in your living room with Beat Saber blocks flying at you.

To enable: Settings > Camera > Mixed Reality Capture > toggle on.

The quality depends heavily on your room’s lighting. Bright, evenly lit rooms look great. Dim rooms look grainy and bad. Natural light near a window works best in my experience.

Capture on Vision Pro

Vision Pro handles capture differently because — well, everything about Vision Pro is different.

Screenshots: Press the Digital Crown and the top button simultaneously. Takes a spatial screenshot that captures depth information.

Spatial Video: The crown button starts spatial video recording. These are 3D videos that look incredible when viewed back on the Vision Pro but look like standard video on any other device.

Screen Recording: Standard iOS screen recording works — swipe down from the status bar, tap the record button. This captures whatever you’re seeing in visionOS, including spatial apps.

The spatial capture is Vision Pro’s killer feature for photography. Looking at a spatial photo you took — with parallax and depth — is genuinely magical. The problem is sharing them. You can view spatial photos on Vision Pro and iPhone 15 Pro/16 (with a 3D viewing mode), but everywhere else they’re flat images.

Composition Tips

VR photography follows a lot of the same rules as real photography, with some weird exceptions.

Rule of thirds still applies. Position your subject off-center. The VR environment wraps around you, but the captured image is a flat rectangle — compose for that rectangle.

Look for lighting. VR environments have designed lighting that’s often beautiful. Position yourself where the light creates interesting shadows or highlights on your subject. Sunrises and sunsets in games like Skyrim VR or Red Matter 2 are gorgeous.

Get close to subjects. In VR, the natural tendency is to stand back and take in the whole scene. But for photography, moving closer to interesting details often creates better images. A close-up of a crafted weapon in a fantasy game can be more striking than a wide shot of the entire scene.

Use the environment’s mood. Horror games have fantastic moody lighting. Colorful games like Vacation Simulator have incredible saturation. Match your composition to the genre.

Wait for moments. In story games, don’t just screenshot randomly. Wait for a dramatic scene, a beautiful vista, or an emotionally charged moment. The best VR photos I’ve taken were planned — I replayed sections knowing exactly where the screenshot-worthy moment was.

The Mixed Reality Content Problem

Here’s something I’ve been thinking about. Mixed reality content — where you film yourself in VR — is incredibly popular on social media. Those Beat Saber videos, the green screen compilations, the reaction clips. But the tools for creating good MR content are still rough.

The Quest 3’s built-in MR capture is fine for casual clips but it has issues:

• The passthrough cameras have limited dynamic range
• The compositing sometimes glitches at the edges of virtual objects
• Audio sync can drift on longer recordings

For better results, the serious content creators use a separate camera (GoPro, mirrorless camera) with LIV or Reality Mixer software to composite VR content onto external camera footage. The setup is more complex — you need to calibrate the external camera’s position relative to the headset — but the quality difference is substantial.

Is it worth the hassle for most people? Probably not. But if you’re making content for YouTube or TikTok, the extra effort is visible.

Editing and Sharing

Editing VR Screenshots

Transfer screenshots from your Quest 3 to your phone via the Meta Quest app, or to your PC via USB. From there, edit like any photo — Lightroom, Snapseed, whatever your tool of choice is.

VR screenshots often benefit from:

• Cropping (the captured FOV is usually wider than what looks good)
• Contrast boost (VR renders can look flat in 2D)
• Slight saturation increase
• Sharpening (compression makes images slightly soft)

Sharing

Instagram, Twitter/X, Reddit communities (r/VRPhotography, r/OculusQuest), and Discord servers dedicated to VR games are the main places people share VR photography.

Tag your platform and game. People discovering VR through cool screenshots is a real thing — I’ve bought multiple games because someone posted an incredible screenshot.

For Video

Edit VR video the same way you’d edit any video — DaVinci Resolve (free), iMovie, Premiere, whatever. The main consideration is that VR video is square or near-square, which means it’ll have black bars on most platforms unless you crop to 16:9 or 9:16.

For TikTok/Reels, crop to vertical. For YouTube, crop to 16:9. For Twitter, square works fine.

My Favorite VR Photos I’ve Taken

I’m not going to link them here but the ones I’m most proud of are:

• A sunrise through the temple pillars in Asgard’s Wrath 2
• A neon tunnel in Synth Riders with the colors perfectly split
• My actual living room with a giant spatial chess board composited through MR capture
• A close-up of the snow globe puzzle in Puzzling Places that looked like a real product photo

VR photography is genuinely an emerging art form. The tools are basic right now, the sharing platforms don’t properly support spatial media yet, and most people don’t think of VR as a place to take photos. But that’ll change.