Which would be more exciting to you: defending your fictional headquarters or defending your house? Meta has posted sample videos of the Quest 3 in action, giving us a hint of its amazing potential.
On June 1, Meta revealed the Quest 3, which will be released in Fall at Meta Connect 2023 (on September 27, 2023). It will start at $499 for 128GB onboard storage. It will be 40% thinner thanks to pancake lenses and will have a new Snapdragon processor with a GPU that is twice as powerful as the Quest 2’s Snapdragon XR2 processor. But without a doubt, the most important feature is its color passthrough camera.
The color passthrough mode enables you to see your surroundings while wearing the headset, like wearing regular glasses. Besides making VR feel less claustrophobic, this feature enables the Quest 3 to project virtual objects in your surroundings. Unlike AR glasses with a postage-stamp sized field of view, Quest 3 can put the virtual objects anywhere around you.
Here is Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg demonstrating some of the ways Quest 3 can use its color passthrough feature:
But didn’t the Quest Pro fail?
Quest 3 is by no means the first VR headset to offer color passthrough. Varjo XR-3 is a mixed reality headset that uses this same technology to enable its users to see virtual objects anywhere around it. However, Varjo XR-3 is intended for business use and costs $6,495. That is in addition to a required EUR1,495 annual subscription for software.
Last year, Meta released a mixed reality headset with a similar idea, the Quest Pro. Like the XR-3, it had a color passthrough camera for mixed reality capabilities and at $1500, it was much more affordable than the XR-3. However, I canceled my Quest Pro order because it seemed to me that Quest Pro would be using mostly just the same app library as the Quest, and indeed my analysis was correct. There were very few apps that really utilized the mixed reality feature, in part because Quest Pro was a business device and Meta expected users to create their own apps. Quest Pro did not sell well and Meta was forced to drop the price to $1000.
If the Quest Pro’s color passthrough did not sell well, why would Quest 3 be any different? The reason is simple: apps. This time, Meta is targeting the Quest 3 to consumers and it appears from this demo that they are going to have apps that take advantage of Quest 3’s mixed reality capabilities. Your living room wall can be turned into an aquarium, or zombies can emerge from them. You can battle with opponents not in some far-off world but right in your living room. Truly unique experiences like these have never been possible for consumers before and I think they just might be the key to making VR mainstream.
What do you think of the Quest 3 demo? Is it enough for Quest 3’s $499 price? Let me know in the comments!
Probably worth mentioning that the Quest Pro was supposed to come with a depth sensor which was taken away at the last minute to save production costs. Hand tracking etc should be much better on Quest 3.
Thanks good point!