Meta Newly Released Its Quest 3 Ahead of Apple New VR Launch

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta has revealed the company’s latest virtual reality headset known as the Meta Quest 3, this announcement came on June 1st, 2023 days before Apple expected headset launch.

Meta Quest 3 will be starting at a price of $499. The CEO made it known with a video he published on Instagram. The post also commended the headset and its functionality stating that it’ll be the first headset to come with “high-res colour mixed reality.” Also, another advantage is that Meta Quest 3 is thinner than Meta Quest 2.

The newly launched VR/AR came with on the front that aids some past-through experiences, where the user can have access to see the real world while having the headset on and interacting with apps.

In the video, there has been lots of modification in the newly released virtual reality-it came with “natural” depth perception for the user and improvements in graphics to help give a good gaming experience.

“High-fidelity color Passthrough, innovative machine learning, and spatial understanding let you interact with virtual content and the physical world simultaneously, creating limitless possibilities to explore,” Meta said in its latest release.

The post also said that Meta Quest 3 will ship with a next-generation Qualcomm chipset. However, Meta promised to provide more information regarding this on September 27, 2023, when the company will be having its Connect conference.

Comparing Meta’s Quest 2 which started out at $299, you’ll notice that the Quest 3 almost doubled that price-this could be as a result of its modification. In another vein, Apple is said to release a competing VR headset next week as part of the company’s June WWDC event. 

Speculations have it that the iPhone maker VR will cost at least $3,000 and it will be accessible to hundreds of thousands of iPad apps.

The release of Quest 3 didn’t come as a surprise after Meta announced that it will release Quest 3 in 2023 as part of the company’s third-quarter 2022 earnings which featured that the company earnings will increase because of “Reality Labs hardware costs driven by the launch of the next generation of our consumer Quest headset later next year.”

Concerning virtual reality, Meta is spending lots of funds in the metaverse. The company lost $3.99 billion in the first quarter while recording $339 million in revenue. The company’s Reality Labs unit in charge of VR and AR technologies made these claims.

As of June 2022, Meat increased the price of the entry-level Quest 2 from $299 to $399 due to a rise in manufacturing and shipping of the device. On Thursday during the Quest 3 release, Meta said that the entry-level Quest 2 price is back to $299 starting from June 4.

The same scenario took place last year in October when Meta released the Quest Pro VR headset for the goal of businesses as opposed to consumers. Quest Pro VR initially sold out for $1,499.99 after which the company dropped its price to $999.99 in March which also contributed to tMeta dropping the price of the Quest 2 headset with extra storage from a whopping sum of $499.99 to $429.99.