Meta unveils Quest 3 VR headset before Apple

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Quest 3, his company’s latest virtual and mixed reality headset, via social media on Thursday, teasing the product before rival Apple’s similar launch expected next week.

In a video on Instagram, Zuckerberg showed the Quest 3, which releases in fall.

Meta said the latest headset features higher resolution, stronger performance with Meta Reality technology and is slimmer with a more comfortable form factor than the previous iteration. The latest device will be 40 percent thinner than the previous Quest 2 model.

For the highest resolution display, the company said the latest headset will feature a Snapdragon chipset developed in collaboration with Qualcomm. The next-generation chipset will double the graphical performance of the Quest 3 compared to the Quest 2, the company explained.

The price of the 128-gigabyte Quest 3 headset starts at $499.99, and an additional storage option will be available, the tech giant said.

In the first quarter of this year, Meta’s Reality Labs unit, in charge of developing VR and AR technologies, recorded an operating loss of $3.99 billion, while generating $339 million in revenue.

More details are to be released on the product on Sept. 27 during the company’s Connect conference, the company added.

Meta’s unveiling comes as other global tech giants have been introducing their own VR headsets to reinvigorate the market.

Apple is expected to release its VR headset next week at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The headset is likely to be equipped with AR technologies and will reportedly cost at least $3,000.

Samsung Electronics, Qualcomm and Google also announced a trilateral partnership to build a next-generation extended reality ecosystem in February, seeing VR and AR technology as means to “transform” the future of human connection.