Meta Platforms (META.O) CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday revealed the company’s next generation mixed reality headset, the Quest 3, as the company braces for Apple to potentially reshape a nascent market that Meta has dominated so far.
Priced starting at $499, the device will be 40% thinner than the company’s previous headset and feature color mixed reality, which combines augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) elements, Zuckerberg said in an Instagram post ahead of Meta’s annual gaming conference.
Meta also said it would lower the prices of its existing Quest 2 headsets, while adding performance upgrades to those devices aimed at delivering a smoother user experience.
The Quest 3 will have a new Qualcomm chipset with twice the graphics performance as the Quest 2, Zuckerberg said. He said the device would launch in the autumn and promised more details at the company’s annual AR/VR conference on Sept. 27.
Zuckerberg’s announcement came less than a week before tech rival Apple (AAPL.O) was expected to unveil its first mixed reality device, a high-end product with a price point around $3,000, according to a Bloomberg report.
Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest Pro devices comprised nearly 80% of the 8.8 million virtual reality headsets sold in 2022, according to an estimate by market research firm IDC.
Far behind in second place at 10% market share was the Pico device by Chinese-owned ByteDance, which also owns social media competitor TikTok.
Still, despite its dominance, Meta has struggled to sell its vision of an immersive “metaverse” of interconnected virtual worlds and expand the market for its devices beyond the niche of the gaming community.
