Meta is forging ahead in its quest to dominate the AR world with the new and improved Meta Quest 3.
Unveiled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the company’s virtual Meta Connect event on Wednesday, the headset starts at $500 and is a complete redesign of previous models. First announced in June, the Quest 3 offers improved performance, immersive new mixed reality features and a sleeker, more comfortable design.
With a much more powerful processor, higher resolution display, redesigned Touch Plus controllers and a 40% slimmer body, the Quest 3 is a big step up from its predecessors. The Meta Quest 2 offers pure virtual reality, while the Meta Quest Pro has advanced pass-through cameras for seeing your actual surroundings, but costs a whopping $1,000.
Most importantly, the Quest 3 has support for Meta Reality, allowing users to enjoy mixed reality experiences that blend the real world with the virtual – for example, you can play a virtual piano on your real coffee table.
“If you pick up a digital ball and throw it at the physical wall, it’s going to bounce off the wall,” Zuckerberg said at Meta Connect on Wednesday. “If somebody’s shooting at you and you want to get out of the way, you just get behind your physical couch.”
The Meta Quest virtual library is fully accessible with the Quest 3 – a library that now includes VR-friendly Roblox, which was released on Wednesday, and will add X Box cloud gaming in December, allowing gamers to play titles like Halo and Minecraft on a big screen anywhere.
The headset is available for pre-order now and will officially launch in stores on 10 October, with two storage options (128GB and 512GB).
Meta’s latest headset comes three years after the Quest 2, less than a year after the Quest Pro and less than four months after the Apple Vision Pro.
Described by Zuckerberg as “the first mainstream mixed reality headset”, the Quest 3 is part of an ongoing arms race between two of tech’s biggest players to dominate the headset space – and Zuckerberg’s personal vision for a next-generation internet where users can interact with each other in virtual spaces that resemble real life. And it comes at a much cheaper price than Apple’s alternative (which will set you back $3,499, to be precise), and is still primarily a VR headset with alternative reality options, whereas Apple’s product is a dedicated mixed reality experience.
To pre-empt Apple’s unveiling of the Vision Pro in June, Zuckerberg teased the Meta Quest 3 just days before its rival’s big announcement. But even before Apple’s launch, the two companies had a tense relationship. They have competed over news and messaging features, and their CEOs have traded barbs over privacy and app store policies. Last February, Meta said it expected to take a $10 billion hit in 2022 from Apple’s move to restrict how apps like Facebook collect data for targeted advertising.
Meta has been the dominant player in the headset market, but has so far struggled to attract a mainstream audience for its VR headset products. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that Meta had just 200,000 active users of Horizon Worlds, its app for socialising in VR. And by 2023, IDC estimates that just 10.1 million AR/VR headsets will be shipped worldwide from the entire market, far less than the tens of millions of iPhones Apple sells each quarter.
Morgan Stanley analysts called Apple’s Vision Pro a “moonshot” after its June announcement, saying the product “has the potential to become Apple’s next computing platform”, but that the company has “much to prove” before the headset launches next year.
The biggest battle may not be between the tech giants, but for public acceptance. Many analysts say the biggest hurdle to consumer adoption of mixed reality headsets is ensuring a wide range of potential use cases and experiences are available on the devices. While Meta has introduced features that allow users to play games, explore virtual worlds, watch YouTube videos, exercise, chat with friends and more, it has yet to convince most consumers that the device is worthwhile.
