Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Acquired LIVE event at Chase Center on Tuesday, September 10, 2024 in San Francisco, California, USA.
David Paul Morris | David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images
Yuan has announced the Quest 3S, the latest virtual reality headset from the company’s Reality Labs division and one that’s more affordable than its predecessor.
The device will be available on October 15 with a retail price starting at $299, down from the 2023 Quest 3’s starting price of $499. Connect event held at the state’s Menlo Park headquarters. The company is positioning the headset as a multitasking computer to compete with Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset launched in February.
Meta’s previous Quest device was the best-selling VR headset, with Millions shipped But these efforts have yet to spark a cultural phenomenon or a mainstream software ecosystem around VR, thanks to heavy marketing and a lower price than many competitors. Including the 2014 acquisition of Oculus, Meta has invested more than $65 billion in hardware research and development.
“I’ve been waiting for this day for a long time,” Zuckerberg said.
CEO Yuan Mark Zuckerberg Defended the company’s spending, saying it was a strategic move to prevent apple Control the hardware platform of the future.
While VR developers hope Apple’s entry into the market will spur a wave of new apps and users, Apple has yet to reveal sales of its headsets, which have been reported to be growing. Small sizeLess than 1 million units were sold, in part because of its high price.
what it does
A representative from Meta said that the “S” stands for “start” – like getting started with VR.
Many of the new Meta features on the $299 Quest 3S that the company discussed Tuesday have counterparts on Apple’s Vision Pro, including a mode that allows the device to be used on airplanes and a mode that simulates a large movie theater inside the headset.
Meta highlighted the improved term “pass-through,” a term used to describe VR headsets that use cameras and sensors outside the device to display live video inside the headset. The feature is designed to make users feel like they are looking through a monitor and allow them to interact with the real world while keeping their headphones on. For Quest 3S, Meta has added a dedicated button to enable passthrough.
The company emphasized the Quest 3S’s ability to multitask and run apps, positioning it as a computing device rather than a gaming console.
“Quest is everything a general-purpose computer can do,” Zuckerberg said.
In a demo provided on Tuesday, Meta showed off the device running up to four apps simultaneously on a floating screen inside the headset, including YouTube videos, a browser, Amazon Music and Meta’s app store. Meta says the headset can handle six windows. But the demo experience wasn’t smooth. If the user doesn’t press the button, the Amazon Music app will crash, the window controls will disappear, and the Meta’s controller will go to sleep after a few minutes.
In addition to the Quest 3S, Meta also announced a price cut for last year’s Quest 3, dropping the price of the 512GB version from $650 to $500. Compared to the Quest 3S, the Quest 3 has a more advanced lens and a high-quality screen with higher resolution.
Additionally, Meta said it would discontinue the Quest Pro, a $999 headset that launched in 2022 but never gained much momentum.
Finally put on glasses
The reason Zuckerberg is investing so much in virtual reality and augmented reality is that he believes the technology will eventually lead to lightweight, transparent glasses that overlay computer graphics and information onto the real world.
Zuckerberg has previously said investing in VR software and hardware is an early step in developing the glasses, which could take up to a decade to develop.
On Wednesday, Zuckerberg showed off an early concept for the glasses. The thick, black-framed prototype, called the Orion, won’t be sold to consumers, but Meta says they will be used internally as the company continues to work on developing consumer glasses it hopes to one day sell.
Zuckerberg said this is Meta’s first “fully functional” glasses prototype.
Meta’s Orion prototype comes out a week later break Release of fifth generation Spectacles AR glasses. These thick-rimmed glasses will only be available to developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for a year if they want to build AR apps for the device.
This isn’t the first time Meta has publicly shown off prototypes of future devices or research projects to show investors and employees where VR and AR technology is heading. Orion glasses are an improvement on Project Nazare, the smart glasses prototype developed by Zuckerberg Announced in 2021when the company changed its name from Facebook.
Meta does team up with EssilorLuxottica to sell a pair of built-in camera glasses called the Ray-Ban Meta, starting at $299. While the glasses don’t have any displays, they do have tiny speakers that allow the devices to play music or interact with the company’s voice assistant, Meta AI.
For example, Ray-Ban Meta glasses can now detect when a user is looking at a Spanish-language sign and, if asked, can translate it in the user’s ear, a new improvement, Meta said. The camera can scan QR codes and extract information such as book titles from the photos taken. Plus, they are stylish and look like a typical pair of sunglasses.
“One of the most important things is they’re just great-looking glasses,” Zuckerberg said.
Another new feature of the glasses is the ability to remember facts such as where the user parked their car.
Li-Chen Miller, vice president of product for Ray-Ban Meta Eyewear, told CNBC that she used the glasses to photograph hotel room doors while traveling and then asked Meta AI to recall the number.
Zuckerberg is excited about Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which have sold more than 730,000 pairs in the first three quarters, according to market research firm IDC. In July, he told investors they “got hit earlier than expected.”
Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced an expansion of their partnership to develop more smart glasses.
Talking artificial intelligence
Zuckerberg has also made improvements to his Meta AI chatbot so that people can interact with it using voice instead of written text.
Users can now have natural voice conversations with Meta AI, which can be accessed through Meta apps like Messenger and Instagram. Users will be able to perform actions using voice, such as telling Meta AI to take a photo by talking to their smartphone.
For Meta AI’s new features, 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 rolled out to users of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand next month.
The feature comes a day after rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced it Advanced voice capabilities For those who pay for their excellent service.
The company said the new chatbot feature is based on Meta’s artificial intelligence model Llama. The company also released a new version of Llama, called Llama 3.2. This updated model can understand images and text, an upgrade from its predecessor, and can respond to written prompts from people.
