Meta unveils cheaper $299 Quest 3S VR headset

Meta announced the Quest 3S, the latest virtual reality headset to come out of the company’s Reality Labs division and a cheaper offering than its predecessor.

The device will go on sale on Oct. 15 and will retail starting at $299, down from the $499 starting price for 2023’s Quest 3. The device can be used to watch movies, as well as run VR fitness apps and gaming, Meta said Wednesday at its Connect event at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The company positioned the headset as a multitasking computer, putting it in competition with Apple’s $3,499 Vision Pro headset that launched in February.

Meta’s previous Quest devices are the bestselling VR headsets, with millions shipped thanks to heavy marketing and a lower price than many competitors, but those efforts have yet to spark a cultural phenomenon or a mainstream software ecosystem around VR. Including its acquisition of Oculus in 2014, Meta has poured more than $65 billion in expenses into its hardware efforts.

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

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has 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 spur a wave of new apps and users, Apple hasn’t revealed sales for its headset and reports say that sales have been in small volumes, under 1 million units, partially due to its high price.

Zuckerberg said they were Meta’s first “fully-functioning” prototype of the glasses, and would be physically tethered to a small “puck.” Zuckerberg also said that it would take advantage of a wrist-based interface, which came out of stems from the company’s 2019 acquisition of CTRL-Labs.

Meta’s Orion prototype comes a week after Snap announced its fifth-generation Spectacles AR glasses. Those thick-framed glasses will only be made available to developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for one full year if they want to build AR apps for the device.

This isn’t the first time Meta publicly revealed a prototype of a 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, prototype smart glasses that Zuckerberg announced in 2021, when the company changed its name from Facebook.

Meta does sell a pair of glasses with a built-in camera in partnership with EssilorLuxottica called Ray-Ban Meta, which start at $299. While these glasses don’t have any displays, 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, if asked, can translate in the user’s ear, a new improvement, Meta said. The camera can scan QR codes, and it can also extract information like book titles out of photos it takes. Plus, they’re stylish and look like a pair of typical sunglasses.

“One of the most important things about this is they’re just good-looking glasses,” Zuckerberg said. 

Another new capability for the glasses is the ability to remember facts like where the user parked. 

Li-Chen Miller, the vice president of product in charge of Ray-Ban Meta glasses, told CNBC that when she travels, she uses the glasses to take photos of her hotel room door, and later, she asks Meta AI to recall the number. 

Zuckerberg is excited about the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which have sold more than 730,000 units in their first three quarters, according to market researcher IDC. In July, he told investors that they were “a bigger hit sooner than expected.”

Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced that they had extended their partnership to develop more smart glasses.

The feature comes one day after rival OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced an advanced voice feature for people who pay its premium service.

The company said that 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 upgrade from its predecessors which generated responses to people’s written prompts.