Zuckerberg Touts Meta Quest 3 as First Mainstream Mixed-Reality Headset, Featuring St

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a (virtual) trip to the Upside Down to pitch his company’s latest effort to make virtual and augmented reality a thing.

The company on Wednesday announced the Meta Quest 3 mixed-reality headset, set to ship Oct. 10 and priced at $499. Zuckerberg showed off the new product in the keynote during the internet company’s two-day virtual Meta Connect event focused on AI and virtual, mixed and augmented realities.

Zuckerberg called it “the first mainstream mixed-reality headset,” which is designed to “blend the digital and physical worlds together.”

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One of the forthcoming titles for the Quest 3 is Stranger Things VR, which will let users “experience the world of ‘Stranger Things’ from the never-before-seen perspective of Vecna as he explores unknown realities” and “enacts his plan for revenge against Eleven and Hawkins.” Zuckerberg showed how the game can open a portal to the Netflix series’ Upside Down universe — seemingly on the wall of your own living room. (Watch the trailer for Stranger Things VR below.) Stranger Things VR, from developer Tender Claws, will launch Nov. 30, 2023, priced at $29.99.

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In addition, Zuckerberg said, Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming is coming to Quest in December 2023, featuring hundreds of titles including “Halo” and “Minecraft.” Other games for the headset include the new “Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR” title; “Lego Bricktales,” an AR game that lets you play with virtual Legos; and a new Roblox experience.

Also at Meta Connect, Sony Pictures Virtual Reality (SPVR) and developer nDreams debuted a minigame intended to showcase what’s possible with mixed reality called “Mini-Puft Mayhem,” playable on Quest 3 headsets within “Ghostbusters: Rise of the Ghost Lord” (due out Oct. 26, $34.99). “Turn your home into a mixed-reality playground and take on an invasion of mischievous Mini-Pufts, the destructive marshmallow ghosts ready to be roasted in your living room,” the companies announced.

The new Quest 3 device will compete for market share against Apple’s Vision Pro augmented-reality headset, set to ship in early 2024 for a cool $3,500, seven times the starting price of the Meta Quest 3. At an internal meeting in June, Zuckerberg downplayed the threat of Apple’s entry into the space, noting the Vision Pro’s high price tag and telling staffers, “There’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws and physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of.”

Zuckerberg also emphasized the “metaverse” aspects of the company’s strategy — enabled by products like the Quest 3 — to let you meet virtually with friends, family and co-workers.

The company claims the Meta Quest 3 is the first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed-reality capabilities. The device includes displays at 2064-by-2208 pixels per eye (giving it a 30% boost in resolution compared with the prior generation Quest 2′s 1832-by-1920 resolution). The Quest 3 starts at $499.99 for the model with 128 gigabytes of storage and $649.99 with 512 GB.

The headset also is 40% thinner than the Quest 2 and is compatible with its entire library of more than 500 VR games, apps and experiences. Meta said a new Qualcomm Snapdragon graphics processing unit in the Quest 3 delivers more than twice the performance as GPU in Quest 2, resulting in smoother performance and “incredibly crisp details in immersive games.”

But the company doesn’t expect the Quest 3 to turn things around immediately in its Reality Labs segment — which is set to bleed even more red ink next year. In 2024, “for Reality Labs, we expect operating losses to increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in augmented reality/virtual reality and investments to further scale our ecosystem,” Meta said in its second-quarter earnings report in July. For Q2, Reality Labs revenue fell 39% to $276 million and operating loss jumped to $3.74 billion (up from an operating loss of $2.81 billion a year prior).

Watch the Stranger Things VR trailer:

https://variety.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Stranger-Things-VR-Meta-Quest-3.mp4

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