If you’ve been patiently waiting for Meta to put the finishing touches on the upgraded Quest 3 VR headset, or even if you’ve been waiting impatiently, we have good news. The company has announced that the Quest 3 be coming out on October 10, with pre-orders live available today at stores like Best Buy. At $499.99 it’s significantly more expensive than its predecessors, but still the cheapest way to get into the current generation of VR gaming by far.
The big change for the Quest 3 is the addition of full-color, high-speed cameras to the exterior of the casing. While the Quest 2 allowed you to “see” through its tracking cameras, the low-res, black-and-white picture was really only useful for stopping yourself from hitting a wall (or catching your friends making rude gestures while your eyes were covered.) The new camera setup allows for far more immediate interaction with the world beyond your headset, not to mention a new focus on augmented reality apps and games.
Other big changes to the design include new hand controllers that don’t need the sensor ring, a 40 percent thinner body enabled by pancake lenses, enhanced 2064×2208 per-eye resolution, a greater field of view, louder open-air speakers, and a more powerful Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor. (Yes, XR2 Gen 2. Nice work, Qualcomm.)
Though it’s primarily designed as a stand-alone device, the Quest 3 will also connect to PCs for gaming with more powerful visuals. That capability, combined with a low price, makes the Quest 2 the most popular VR headset on Steam, far outpacing Valve’s own Index hardware.
Meta is betting big on that expanded augmented reality functionality being a win for the Quest 3. And it really needs one. Despite selling more than 20 million Quest headsets since acquiring the Oculus company and VR technology, Meta is burning through billions of dollars chasing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse ambitions, which don’t seem to appeal to anyone else. That’s not a great place to be in, especially with Apple poised to enter the market at the extreme high end with its Vision Pro headset next year.