The face-computing metaverse still hasn’t gone mainstream, but that isn’t stopping Meta from trying to make it so.
Today Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed full details about Meta’s latest VR headset, the Quest 3. Like its predecessors, the Quest 3 covers the wearer’s eyes and sides of their face like a pair of ski goggles. This has been one of its biggest barriers to widespread adoption, because most of us would rather bury our faces in the glass slabs in our hands than limit our vision in a full-fledged face computer. But this newest Quest—a tech device borne from Meta’s acquisition of Oculus nearly a decade ago—relies more on mixed reality, suggesting that the future of head-mounted computers might actually involve seeing the real world a little bit more.
Zuckerberg, in his keynote address at the Meta Connect developer conference, emphasized that he believes the future of computing is a fully melded, physical-digital world. He also called the Quest 3 the industry’s first “mainstream reality headset.”
“The physical world around us is amazing. One of life’s great joys is being able to go outside and explore,” he said. “But our industry has been building up this digital world alongside it. People say, ‘The digital world isn’t the real world,” but we really think the real world is a combination of the physical world we inhabit, and the digital world we’re building.”
Meta has been teasing the Quest 3 in preliminary announcements since the summer in an effort to build hype around the product. Now we know it will start shipping on October 10, and cost $500 for a base model with 128 gigabytes of internal storage. The 512 GB model will cost $650.
The new Meta Quest 3 is lighter and slimmer and has more memory than the Meta Quest 2—all of the things you’d expect from a “new,” updated gadget. It’s running on Snapdragon’s XR2 Gen 2 chipset, which affords it better graphics performance.
Photograph: Meta
