Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg reveals the company’s next generation Mixed Reality headset. (Representative)
New York:
Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday revealed the company’s next-generation mixed reality headset, the Quest 3, as it looks to potentially reshape a nascent market for Apple that has so far The meta has been dominating.
Priced starting at $499, the device will be 40% thinner than the company’s previous headsets and feature color mixed reality, which combines augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) elements, Mark Zuckerberg said in an Instagram post. .
Meta also said it would reduce the prices of its existing Quest 2 headsets, while adding performance upgrades aimed at providing a better user experience.
Zuckerberg said that the Quest 3 would feature a new Qualcomm chipset with twice the graphics performance of the Quest 2. He said the device would launch in the autumn and promised more details on September 27 at the company’s annual AR/VR conference.
Zuckerberg’s announcement comes less than a week before tech rival Apple is expected to unveil its first mixed reality device, a high-end product with a price point of around $3,000, according to a Bloomberg report. Was.
According to an estimate by market research firm IDC, Meta’s Quest 2 and Quest Pro devices will comprise about 80% of the 8.8 million virtual reality headsets sold in 2022.
In second place with 10% market share was the Pico device by Chinese-owned 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 to expand the market for its devices beyond the niche of the gaming community.
The company has eight of the 10 most popular apps on its Quest store classified in the gaming category, according to a Reuters count.
After a spike in interest during the pandemic, headset sales declined in the first quarter of this year, with the total AR/VR headset market down 54.4% year-on-year.
Revenue from Meta’s Reality Labs segment, which includes headset sales, declined 50% in the most recent quarter compared to the prior year.
That leaves the meta behind on the trajectory once envisioned 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 lull,” said Jitesh Ubrani, a research manager who tracks the virtual reality market at IDC. “VR to date has been largely built around gaming. And I think gaming will still continue to be the major use case.”
In the gaming market too, the meta is under threat from Sony, which dominates the console market with the PS5. Sony released its second generation headset dedicated to games, the PS VR2, in February and has significant developer support.
In March, Meta cut the prices of most of its existing Quest headsets in hopes of stirring up demand, after raising the price of its entry-level Quest 2 128GB version to July 2022.
Its high-end Meta Quest Pro now retails for $1,000, down from its launch price of $1,500, and the 256GB version of the Quest 2 now starts at about $430, down from $500.
The company said Thursday it will slash Quest 2 prices once again starting June 4, with the entry-level device returning to its original price tag of $300 and the 256-GB version dropping to $350.
To engage a more massive audience, Zuckerberg has ventured into the world of fitness in recent years, fencing with Olympic medalists and trading punches with mixed martial arts fighters himself using meta equipment. Posted videos of
They won a battle with the US antitrust regulator to acquire the app developer behind VR fitness app Supernatural. During the trial, prosecutors showed evidence that Meta executives had identified fitness as a way to expand VR use beyond its existing fan base of mostly young male gamers.
Zuckerberg also created productivity tools to market Quest headsets as virtual offices, including a partnership 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.)