The Morning After: Meta announces its new mixed-reality headset, the Quest 3

Mark Zuckerberg has revealed the Meta Quest 3, the company’s long-rumored, next-gen virtual reality headset, just a few days before Apple’s WWDC, where it’s expected to debut its own first, mixed reality headset. As with the Quest Pro, the Quest 3 supports mixed reality and offers full-color passthrough. This enables users to see a color version of the physical space around them, and the headset will apparently be able to add augmented reality elements into it.

Zuckerberg says it will offer twice the graphical power of the Quest 2, and it’s 40 percent thinner than its predecessor. Meta has redesigned the controllers, too, nixing the outer tracking rings and adding TruTouch haptic feedback. The headset will start at $500 for 128GB of storage, and it’ll be available this fall in all countries the Quest 2 is available. Expect to hear more details at its on September 27th.

If you already own a Quest headset, there’s good news too: An upcoming software update will boost the performance of the Quest 2 and Quest Pro. Meta says the CPU of each headset will get a performance increase of up to 26 percent, with a GPU boost of up to 19 percent on Quest 2 and 11 percent on Quest Pro. Dynamic Resolution Scaling will be enabled on both headsets as well, to help stabilize frame rates.

– Mat Smith

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