Meta Quest 3 unveiled forward of Apple’s deliberate VR headset debut
Meta Quest 3 VR headset
Meta
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased his firm’s newest digital actuality headset, the Quest 3, on Thursday.
The brand new headset will begin at $499, Zuckerberg stated in a video on Instagram. The publish famous that it will be the primary introduced headset with “high-res shade combined actuality.” The Quest 3 is 40% thinner than its predecessor, the Quest 2.
It seems to have no less than three cameras on the entrance which will enhance among the pass-through experiences, the place a consumer can see the true world round them whereas carrying the headset and interacting with apps. The video famous that it had improved “pure” depth notion for the wearer, and touted graphics enhancements for gaming.
“Excessive-fidelity shade Passthrough, progressive machine studying, and spatial understanding allow you to work together with digital content material and the bodily world concurrently, creating limitless potentialities to discover,” Meta said in a release.
The Quest 3 will ship with a next-generation Qualcomm chipset, the publish stated. Meta stated it’s going to present extra particulars on Sept. 27 throughout its Join convention.
Meta’s Quest 2 headset was released within the fall of 2020 at a beginning value of $299.
Apple is predicted to debut its competing VR headset subsequent week as a part of the corporate’s June WWDC occasion. The iPhone-maker’s shopper headset, which might additionally incorporate augmented actuality applied sciences, will reportedly work with a whole lot of 1000’s of iPad apps and value no less than $3,000.
Meta first announced that it might debut the Quest 3 this 12 months as a part of the corporate’s third-quarter 2022 earnings when it stated that the corporate’s value of income would develop partially due to “Actuality Labs {hardware} prices pushed by the launch of our subsequent era of our shopper Quest headset later subsequent 12 months.”
Meta continues to be spending closely within the metaverse, the yet-to-be-developed digital universe that requires digital actuality and augmented actuality applied sciences to entry.
The corporate’s Actuality Labs unit, which is growing VR and AR applied sciences, recorded an working lack of $3.99 billion within the firm’s first quarter whereas producing $339 million in income.
In July 2022, Meta raised the value of the entry-level Quest 2 from $299 to $399, citing an increase within the prices to fabricate and ship the gadget. It stated on Thursday it’s going to decrease the value of that headset again all the way down to $299 starting June 4.
Final October, Meta debuted its Quest Professional VR headset supposed for companies versus shoppers. Though the Quest Professional initially offered for $1,499.99, Meta lowered the value of the gadget to $999.99 in March whereas additionally dropping the value of a costlier model of the Quest 2 headset with additional storage from $499.99 to $429.99.
Analysis group NPD Group advised CNBC final December that sales of VR headsets within the U.S. declined 2% in 2022 from a 12 months earlier to $1.1 billion, indicating that the immersive know-how continues to be far-off from being a mainstream shopper electronics hit.