A Meta employee sets up a Quest 3S, a new entry-level model of Meta’s mixed reality headset, for demonstrations for content creators and journalists ahead of Meta Connect, Meta’s annual event for the latest software and hardware innovations, in Menlo Park, California. on September 24, 2024.
Julie Jammot | Afp | Getty Images
After 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 October 15th and will retail for $299, down from the original price of $499 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 the Connect event 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.
In addition to the Quest 3S, Meta also unveiled its latest augmented reality smartglasses prototype on Wednesday and announced a number of new features for its Meta AI chatbot.
Meta’s previous Quest devices are the best-selling 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 2014 acquisition of Oculus, Meta has poured more than $65 billion in spending into its hardware efforts.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended the company’s spending as a strategic prevention initiative Apple from controlling future hardware platforms.
While there was hope among VR developers that Apple’s entry into the market would spark a wave of new apps and users, Apple did not disclose sales for its headset, and reports indicate that sales were small volumesbelow 1 million units, partly due to its high price.
What does he do?
A Meta spokesperson said the “S” in Quest 3S stands for “start” — as in getting started with VR.
Many of the new Meta features the company discussed for the $299 Quest 3S have counterparts in Apple’s Vision Pro, including a mode that allows the device to be used on an airplane and another that simulates a large movie theater inside the headset.
Meta highlighted improved “pass-through,” the term used to describe 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 intended to make users feel like they are looking through a screen and allows them to interact with the real world while keeping the headset on. For Quest 3S, Meta added a special button to enable passthrough.
The company has emphasized the Quest 3S’s ability to multitask and run apps, positioning it as a computing device, rather than a game console.
“All the things you can do with a general purpose computer, the Quest is the complete package,” Zuckerberg said.
In demonstrations provided Tuesday, Meta showed the device running up to four apps simultaneously on floating screens inside the headphones, including a YouTube video, a browser, Amazon Music and Meta’s app store. Meta says the handset can handle six windows. But the demo experience was anything but smooth. The Amazon Music app crashed, window controls would disappear, and Meta controllers would sleep after a few minutes if the user didn’t press buttons.
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 $649 to $499. The Quest 3 has more advanced lenses and a superior display with a higher resolution than the Quest 3S.
In addition, Meta said it will discontinue the Quest Pro, the $999 headset launched in 2022 that never gained much traction, and the older Quest 2 headset.
Finally, glasses
Prototype Meta Orion AR Goggles
After
Zuckerberg’s justification for spending so much on VR and AR is his belief that the technology will eventually lead to lightweight, transparent glasses that overlay computer graphics and information on the real world.
The investment in VR software and hardware are the first steps toward those glasses, which could take up to a decade to develop, Zuckerberg previously said.
Zuckerberg showed off 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.
“Here we go,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta hopes the next version of Orion will be available to consumers as the company’s first full AR glasses, Zuckerberg said without giving a timeline for when that might be.
Orion is Meta’s first “fully functional” prototype AR glasses, Zuckerberg said, and the device is attached wirelessly to a small “puck.” The prototype uses a wristband attachment to receive users’ neural signals and allow them to control the Orion glasses using their brains. This technology comes from the company’s 2019 CTRL-Labs acquisition.
Orion allows users to play games, multitask with multiple windows and video conference with people around the world represented by a lifelike avatar, Zuckerberg said.
Meta’s Orion prototype arrives a week later Break announced its fifth-generation Spectacles AR glasses. These thick-rimmed glasses will only be available to developers, who must commit to paying $99 a month for a full year if they want to build AR apps for the device.
This isn’t the first time Meta has publicly unveiled a prototype of future devices or research projects to show investors and employees where VR and AR technology is headed. The Orion glasses are an improvement on Project Nazare, original smart glasses that Zuckerberg announced in 2021 when the company changed its name from Facebook.
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are powered by a Qualcomm chip. Qualcomm, Samsung and Google are working on smart glasses, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Meta is selling a pair of glasses with a built-in camera in collaboration with EssilorLuxottica called the Ray-Ban Meta, which start at $299 and were announced in 2023. While these glasses don’t have any screens, they do have tiny speakers that allow the device to playing music or interacting with Meta AI, the company’s voice assistant.
At Wednesday’s event, Meta announced new Meta AI capabilities for Ray-Ban smart glasses.
For example, Ray-Ban Meta glasses will be able to detect when a wearer is looking at a sign in Spanish and, if asked, will be able to translate into the wearer’s ear, a new improvement, Meta said. The camera can scan QR codes and can also extract information such as book titles from photos it takes.
Another new feature for the glasses is the ability to remember events such as where the wearer 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 from her hotel room door and later, asks Meta AI to recall the number. .
Those features will be available “later this year,” the company said.
Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses have sold more than 730,000 units in the first three quarters, according to market researcher IDC. In July, Zuckerberg told investors that they had “greater success earlier than expected.”
Last week, EssilorLuxottica and Meta announced that they had expanded their partnership to develop more smart glasses.
AI that talks
Zuckerberg also introduced improvements to the Meta AI chatbot that will allow people to interact with it using their voice in addition to written prompts.
With voice, users will be able to have spoken conversations with Meta AI, which is accessible through Meta’s apps. Users will be able to perform actions using their voice, such as telling Meta AI to take a photo by speaking into their smartphone.
For the new Meta AI feature, the company is using computer-generated voices from 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 next month for US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand users of WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger.
The Meta AI announcement comes a day after that of competitor OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT an advanced voice feature for people who pay for its premium service.
Meta’s new chatbot features are based on the company’s AI model, Llama. Meta on Wednesday announced a newer version of Llama, called Llama 3.2. This updated model can understand both images and text, an upgrade from its predecessors that generated responses to users’ written prompts.
CLOCK: Meta chatbot to use celebrity voices
