Meta introduces cheaper Quest 3S VR headset for $299

Meta announced the Quest 3S, the latest virtual reality headset from the company's Reality Labs division and a more affordable offering than its predecessor.

The device will go on sale Oct. 15 and will start at $299, compared to the $499 starting price of 2023's Quest 3. The device can be used to watch movies and run VR fitness apps and games, Meta said Wednesday at its Connect event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The company positioned the headset as a multitasking computer, putting it in competition with Apple's $3,499 Vision Pro headset, which launched in February.

Meta's Quest devices to date are the best-selling VR headsets, and millions have been shipped thanks to intensive marketing efforts and a lower price than many competitors. But those efforts have not yet sparked a cultural phenomenon or a mainstream software ecosystem around VR. Including the acquisition of Oculus in 2014, Meta has poured more than $65 billion into its hardware efforts.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Zuckerberg said.

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

Although there was hope among VR developers that Apple's entry into the market would unleash a wave of new apps and users, Apple has not disclosed sales figures for its headset. Reports suggest that only small quantities (under a million units) have been sold, in part due to the high price.

A Meta representative said the “S” stands for “Start” – that is, “First Steps with VR.”

Many of the new meta features the company unveiled Tuesday for its $299 Quest 3S have counterparts in Apple's Vision Pro, including a mode that lets the device be used on an airplane and another that simulates a large movie theater inside the headset.

Meta highlighted improved “passthrough,” the term used when a VR headset uses cameras and sensors on the outside of the device to display live, real-time video inside the headset. This feature is designed to give users the feeling of looking through a display and allow them to interact with the real world while keeping the headset on. For the Quest 3S, Meta added a dedicated button to turn on passthrough.

The company highlighted the Quest 3S's multitasking and app capabilities, positioning it as a computing device rather than a gaming console.

“Quest offers everything you can do with a general-purpose computer, the complete package,” Zuckerberg said.

In demos Tuesday, Meta showed the device running up to four apps at once on floating screens inside the headset, including a YouTube video, a browser, Amazon Music and Meta's app store. Meta says the headset can handle six windows. The demo didn't go smoothly, though. The Amazon Music app crashed, window controls disappeared and Meta's controllers would go to sleep after a few minutes if the user didn't 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 $650 to $500. The Quest 3 has more advanced lenses and a better screen with a higher resolution than the Quest 3S.

In addition, Meta announced that it will stop production of the Quest Pro, its $999 headset that launched in 2022 and never really took off.

Zuckerberg's rationale for spending heavily on VR and augmented reality is his belief that the technology will ultimately result in lightweight, transparent glasses that overlay computer graphics and information on top of the real world.

Investments in VR software and hardware are the first steps toward these glasses, the development of which could take up to a decade, Zuckerberg said previously.

Zuckerberg showed an early concept of what those glasses might look like on Wednesday. The thick, black-framed 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 one day sell.

Zuckerberg said it was Meta's first “fully functional” prototype of the glasses, and it would be physically attached to a small “puck.”

Meta's Orion prototype arrives one week after Snap into place announced the fifth generation of Spectacles AR glasses. These thick-framed glasses will only be available to developers, who must commit to paying $99 per month for a year if they want to create AR apps for the device.

This isn't the first time Meta has publicly unveiled a prototype of future devices or 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 smart glasses that Zuckerberg announced in 2021 when the company changed its name from Facebook.

Meta, in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, sells a pair of glasses with a built-in camera called the Ray-Ban Meta, starting at $299. While these glasses don't have a display, they do have tiny speakers that allow the device to play music or interact with Meta AI, the company's voice assistant.

For example, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses can now detect when a user is looking at a sign in Spanish and translate it into their ear when asked – a new improvement, says Meta. The camera can scan QR codes and also extract information such as book titles from photos taken. They are also stylish and look like regular sunglasses.

“One of the most important things about it is that they are just good looking glasses,” Zuckerberg said.

Another new feature of the glasses is that they can remember, for example, where the user parked.

Li-Chen Miller, vice president of product for Ray-Ban Meta glasses, told CNBC that when she travels with the glasses, she takes photos of her hotel room door and then asks Meta AI to remember the number.

Zuckerberg is enthusiastic about Ray-Ban's meta-smart glasses, which sold more than 730,000 units in the first three quarters, according to research firm IDC. In July, he told investors they were “a bigger success faster than expected.”

Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced that they have expanded their partnership to develop additional smart glasses.

Zuckerberg also unveiled improvements to his Meta AI chatbot that allow users to interact with it using voice rather than written text.

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

For Meta AI’s new feature, the company uses computer-generated voices of celebrities such as Awkwafina, Judi Dench, John Cena, Keegan-Michael Key and Kristen Bell.

The new Siri-like meta-AI voice feature will be available to WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger users in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand over the next month.

The feature comes a day after rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced an enhanced voice feature for users of its premium service.

The company said the new chatbot features are based on Meta's AI model, Llama. The company also announced a newer version of Llama, called Llama 3.2. This updated model can understand both images and text, an improvement over its predecessors that generated responses to users' written prompts.