Meta will sell its virtual reality headset, the Quest 3, for $499.99
The Quest 3 Mixed Reality Headset: Status and Spectroscopy on Meta’s Future, and Implications for Sims, Fingerprinting and Touch Touch
The headset is coming in the fall with a 128-gigabyte version available for $499.99, and an additional storage option for those who want more space. The new design of the Quest 3 is 40% lighter than its predecessor, and has twice the graphics performance.
In addition, an upcoming software update for the Quest 2 and Meta’s more expensive Quest Pro will increase their CPU and GPU performance and enable Dynamic Resolution Scaling.
A showcase for games on Meta’s virtual reality platform begins later today at 1PM Eastern, just hours before Apple’s long-rumored mixed reality headset is expected to be announced. The annual Meta Connect event is planned for September 27th, and Meta promised additional details on a title that would be shown there.
We had a good idea of how the device would turn out after Mark Gurman reported he had been given a chance to try it out.
There are three new areas on the front of the device that do the most to differentiate it from the earlier versions, as shown in the video. Gurman said that the pill-shaped zones hold four cameras split evenly between the left and right sides, with a single depth sensor in the middle, to improve the headset’s performance.
We also see the new Touch Plus controllers with TruTouch haptics “for experiences you can feel,” without the old rings they used to have for positional tracking. This announcement did not give a lot of detail about the sensor setup, but the depth sensor should work with the controllers and hand tracking will be supported out of the box.
The Quest 2 is sold, but does it play dice at all scales? Meta admits a large share of its fans are frustrated by the lack of connectivity to the PC
The latest Steam Hardware Survey shows over a quarter of headset users connect a Quest 2 to their PC compared to less than one percent using the original.
Meta can justify supporting the Quest 2 since it was more popular than the original. Meta revealed in a February internal presentation (scooped by my colleague Alex Heath) that Quest had sold nearly 20 million units, and the Quest 2 likely accounted for the vast majority of that, given it did 5x the preorders at launch and was already estimated to have sold 10 million worth of that total as of November 2021.
He’s not ruling out the possibility of Quest 3-exclusive or best-on-Quest 3 games, though: “Of course mixed reality and high-power titles may start to target Quest 3 over time,” he adds.
