Price reductions and performance improvements will be made to Meta’s current Quest 2 headphones.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta Platforms, on Thursday unveiled the company’s Quest 3 next-generation mixed reality headset as the company prepares for Apple’s ability to transform a budding sector that Meta has controlled thus far.
Prior to the annual Meta gaming conference, Zuckerberg revealed the device in an Instagram post. The new headset from the business will start at $499 and be 40% smaller. Additionally, it will provide colour mixed reality, which combines AR/VR elements.
Additionally, Meta announced that it would reduce the cost of its current Quest 2 headsets while enhancing its functionality to provide a more pleasurable user experience.
According to Zuckerberg, the Quest 3’s new Qualcomm chipset would offer twice as much graphical performance as the Quest 2 did. At the company’s annual AR/VR conference on September 27, he promised additional information and stated that the device would debut in the autumn.
According to a projection by market research company IDC, Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets accounted for close to 80% of the 8.8 million virtual reality headsets purchased in 2022.
The Pico device made by ByteDance, a Chinese company that also controls TikTok, a social media rival, came in second place with 10% of the market.
Even so, despite its market dominance, Meta has found it difficult to sell its concept of a fully immersive “metaverse” of interconnected virtual worlds and to broaden the market for its products beyond the specific gaming community.
Reuters counted the top ten downloaded apps from the company’s Quest store, and found that eight of them were categorised as games.
Following a spike in interest during the epidemic, headset sales plunged in the first quarter of this year, with the market for AR/VR headsets as a whole plummeting 54.4% year over year.
The most recent quarter saw a 50% decrease in revenue from Meta’s Reality Labs segments, which includes headset sales.
In terms of the trajectory originally planned for the unit, that puts Meta far behind. In 2018, a Meta executive made the following forecast: within ten years, the metaverse of the firm would contain 100 million hardware units, with Meta devices accounting for half of those.
IDC research manager Jitesh Ubrani, who monitors the virtual reality business, predicted a slowdown between now and the end of the year. To now, virtual reality has primarily been centred on gaming. The primary use case, in my opinion, will still be gaming in the future.
Sony, which controls the console industry with its PS5 model, poses a challenge to Meta even in the gaming sector. The PS VR2, a second-generation gaming headset that Sony debuted in February, has a sizable developer community.
With its Quest 3 announcement and its annual gaming expo, when the company hinted at new ways players will be able to defeat bad robots and slay vampires.
After upping the price of its base Quest 2 128 GB version in July 2022, Meta reduced the pricing of the most of its current Quest headsets in March in an effort to boost demand.
On Thursday, the business announced that starting on June 4, it would reduce the Quest 2 costs once again, with the entry-level gadget returning to its initial price of $300 and decreasing to $350 for the 256 GB model.
In an effort to appeal to a larger audience, Zuckerberg has recently made overtures to the fitness industry by sharing videos of himself wearing Meta devices while fencing with Olympic medalists and sparring blows with fighters in mixed martial arts.
In order to purchase the developer of the VR fitness app Supernatural, he had to fight off US antitrust regulators. In the courtroom, the government’s attorneys presented proof that Meta officials had recognised fitness as a strategy to broaden VR use beyond its current fan base of primarily young male gamers.
Additionally, in order to promote the Quest headsets as virtual offices, Zuckerberg developed productivity features. This included a collaboration with Microsoft to make Microsoft Office apps like Teams and Outlook available on the devices.
