Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s next-generation mixed reality headset. (representative)
New York:
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the company’s next-generation mixed reality headset, the Quest 3, on Thursday as it braces for Apple to potentially reshape an emerging market that Meta has dominated to date .
Starting at $499, the device will be 40% thinner than the company’s previous headset and feature color mixed reality that combines elements of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), Mark Zuckerberg said in an Instagram post. -message.
Meta also said it would lower the prices of its existing Quest 2 headsets while adding performance upgrades to provide a smoother user experience.
The Quest 3 gets a new Qualcomm chipset with twice the graphics performance of the Quest 2, Zuckerberg said. He said the device would launch in the fall 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 was expected to unveil its first mixed reality device, a high-end product priced around $3,000, according to a Bloomberg report.
Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest Pro devices made up 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 with a 10% market share was the Pico device from Chinese company ByteDance, which also owns social media competitor TikTok.
Yet, 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 gaming community niche.
According to a count by Reuters, the company classified eight of the ten most popular apps on the Quest store in the gaming category.
After a burst of interest during the pandemic, headset sales plummeted in the first quarter of this year, with the overall AR/VR headset market down 54.4% year over year.
Revenue from Meta’s Reality Labs segments, which includes headset sales, fell 50% in the most recent quarter compared to the year before.
That puts Meta well behind a trajectory once devised for the unit. A Meta executive predicted in 2018 that the company’s metaverse would reach 100 million hardware units within a decade, half of which would be Meta devices.
“Between now and the end of the year, there will be a slowdown,” said Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager who monitors the virtual reality market at IDC. “VR has largely been built around gaming so far. And I think gaming will continue to be the dominant use case going forward.”
Even in the gaming market, Meta is threatened by Sony, which dominates the console market with the PS5. Sony released its own second-generation gaming headset, the PS VR2, in February and has significant developer support.
In March, Meta slashed prices on most of its existing Quest headsets in hopes of fueling demand, after raising the price of its entry-level Quest 2 128GB in July 2022.
The high-end Meta Quest Pro is on sale now for around $1,000, down from a $1,500 launch price, and the Quest 2’s 256GB version now starts at around $430, down from $500.
The company said on Thursday it would lower Quest 2 prices again starting June 4, dropping the entry-level model back to its original price tag of $300 and the 256GB version to $350.
In recent years, to attract a wider audience, Zuckerberg has been reaching out to the fitness world by posting videos of himself using meta-devices while fencing with Olympic medalists and trading punches with mixed martial arts fighters.
He won a battle with US antitrust regulators to acquire the app developer behind the VR fitness app Supernatural. At trial, government lawyers showed evidence that Meta executives had identified fitness as a way to expand VR use beyond the existing fan base of mostly young male gamers.
Zuckerberg also built productivity tools to market the Quest headsets as virtual offices, including partnering with Microsoft to bring apps like Teams and Outlook to the devices.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)