Meta unveils $299 Quest 3S VR headset, Orion AR glasses prototype

Meta announced the Quest 3S, the latest virtual reality headset to come out of the company’s Reality Labs division and a cheaper offering than its predecessor.

The device will go on sale on October 15 and will be sold starting at $299, down from the starting price of $499 for Quest 3 in 2023. The device can be used to watch movies, as well as run VR fitness apps and games, Meta said Wednesday. at the Connect event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The company pitches the headset as a multitasking computer, making it a competitor to Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset that launched in February.

In addition to the Quest 3S, Meta Rebo also presented the latest prototype of augmented-reality smart glasses and announced new features for the Meta AI chatbot.

The Quest Meta device was previously the best-selling VR headset, with millions shipped thanks to heavy marketing and lower prices than many of its competitors, but its efforts have yet to spark a cultural phenomenon or major software ecosystem in VR. Including the acquisition of Oculus in 2014, Meta has poured more than $65 billion into its hardware efforts.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has defended the company’s spending as a strategic initiative to curb it Apple from controlling future hardware platforms.

Although there is hope among VR developers that Apple’s entry into the market will lead to a wave of applications and new users, Apple has not announced sales of the headset and reports say that sales have been in low volume, less than 1 million units, partly due to the high price.

Meta’s representatives say the “S” in Quest 3S stands for “start” — as in starting VR.

Many of the new Meta features that the company is discussing for $299 Quest 3S have a counterpart in Apple Vision Pro, including a mode that allows the device to be used in an airplane and another that simulates a large cinema in the headset.

Meta highlighted “passthrough,” a term used to describe when VR headsets use cameras and sensors outside the device to display video directly inside the headset. These functions are intended to make the user feel like they are looking at a screen and allow them to interact with the real world while the headset remains on. For Quest 3S, Meta added a special button to turn on passthrough.

The company has emphasized the ability of the Quest 3S to multitask and run apps, positioning it as a computing device, rather than a game console.

“Everything you can do with a general purpose computer, Quest is a complete package,” Zuckerberg said.

In a demo given Tuesday, Meta showed the device running up to four apps at once on a floating screen on the headset, including YouTube videos, the browser, Amazon Music and the Meta app store. Meta said the headset can handle six windows. But the demo experience was uneventful. The Amazon Music app crashes, the window controls disappear and the Meta controller goes to sleep after a few minutes if the user does not press any buttons.

In addition to the Quest 3S, Meta also announced a price cut for last year’s Quest 3, bringing the price of the 512GB version down from $649 to $499. The Quest 3 has an advanced lens and a superior screen with a higher resolution than the Quest 3S.

Additionally, Meta said it will discontinue the Quest Pro, a $999 headset launched in 2022 that never gained momentum.

Zuckerberg’s justification for spending so much on VR and AR is his belief that the technology will eventually reside in transparent, lightweight glasses that overlay computer graphics and information onto the real world.

The investment in VR software and hardware is an early step for the glasses, which could take up to a decade to develop, Zuckerberg said earlier.

Zuckerberg showed an early concept of the glasses on Wednesday. The thick, black prototype, called Orion, won’t be sold to consumers, but Meta says it will be used internally as the company continues to work on the consumer glasses it hopes to sell.

“This is where we’re going,” Zuckerberg said.

Meta hopes the next version of Orion will be available to consumers as the company’s first full AR glasses, Zuckerberg said without giving a timetable for when.

Orion is Meta’s first “working” prototype AR glasses, and the device is attached to a small “puck,” Zuckerberg said. The prototype uses a wristband component to capture the user’s neural signals and allow them to control the Orion glasses using their brain. The technology comes from 2019 company acquisition of CTRL-Labs.

Orion enables users to play games, multi-task with multiple windows. and videoconference with people around the world represented by a real avatar, Zuckerberg said.

The Orion Meta prototype arrived a week later snap announced the fifth generation of Spectacles AR glasses. The thick-framed glasses will only be available to developers, who will have to pay $99 per month for a year if they want to create AR apps for the device.

This isn’t the first time Meta has announced prototype devices or future research projects to signal to investors and employees where VR and AR technology is headed. The Orion glasses are an improvement on Project Nazare, a prototype of smart glasses that Zuckerberg announced in 2021, when the company changed its name from Facebook.

Meta does not sell a pair of glasses with a camera built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica called Ray-Ban Meta, which starts at $299 and will be announced in 2023. While these glasses do not have a screen, they do have a small speaker that allows the device to play music or communicate with Meta AI, the company’s voice assistant.

As part of Wednesday’s event, Meta announced a new Meta AI feature for Ray-Ban smart glasses.

For example, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses will be able to detect when the user is looking at a sign in Spanish and, if requested, can translate it into the user’s ear, a new improvement, Meta said. The camera can scan QR codes, and can also extract information like book titles from the photos it takes.

Another new capability for the glasses is the ability to remember facts like where the user parked.

Li-Chen Miller, vice president of product responsible for Ray-Ban Meta sunglasses, told CNBC that when he was traveling, he used the glasses to take a photo of a hotel room door, and later, he asked the Meta AI to remember the number. .

The feature will be available “later this year,” the company said.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have sold more than 730,000 units in the first three quarters, according to market researcher IDC. In July, Zuckerberg told investors that he “hits faster than expected.”

Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced that they have extended their partnership to develop smarter glasses.

Zuckerberg also introduced improvements to the Meta AI chatbot that will allow people to interact with voice instead of written text.

Users will now be able to have natural voice conversations with Meta AI, accessed through Meta apps like Messenger and Instagram. Users will be able to perform actions using their voice, such as telling Meta AI to take a photo by talking to their smartphone.

For its new feature Meta AI, the company used the computer-generated voices of celebrities including Awkwafina, Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key and Kristen Bell.

The new Siri-like Meta AI voice feature will be available next month for US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger users.

The feature comes a day after rival OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, announced an advanced voice feature for people paying for its premium service.

The company says the new chatbot feature is based on Meta’s AI model, Llama. The company also announced a newer version of Llama, called Llama 3.2. This updated model can recognize images and text, an upgrade from its predecessors that generated responses to human-written directions.

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