Meta Platforms Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the Acquired LIVE event at Chase Center on Tuesday, September 10, 2024 in San Francisco, California, USA.
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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, competing with Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro headset launched in February.
Meta's previous Quest device was the best-selling VR headset, selling millions of units thanks to heavy marketing and a lower price than many competitors, but those efforts have yet to spark a cultural phenomenon around VR or a mainstream software ecosystem. 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.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg argued that the company's spending 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.
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 features for those who pay for the premium 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.
watch: Meta chatbot uses celebrity voices
