Meta Quest 3 Announced, But Will Apple Spoil The Party?

pczone.co.uk:

Another mainstream VR headset is on its way, the long rumoured Meta Quest 3. But with Apple widely expected to reveal their own vision for VR at WWDC this coming week, will the company from Cupertino do what they do best and completely revolutionise the fledging VR industry?

If so, will the Meta Quest 3 be embarrassingly obsolete before it even hits store shelves this autumn?

Compared to the Meta Quest 2, the new third generation headset hosts some hardware refinements. Higher resolution screens teamed with a 2x more powerful Snapdragon GPU should enable higher fidelity graphics and smoother gameplay.

The quality of the experience has also been enhanced. The Quest 3 Touch Plus controllers support improved haptic feedback that should ‘feel more like an extension of your own hand’. Don’t like controllers? Hand tracking will be supported out of the box. The headset itself is 40% slimmer and lighter than the previous model, a major comfort win.

One of the biggest changes though is how Meta Quest 3 handles mixed reality. Meta claim the headset will seamlessly blend the real world with the virtual, allowing players to “navigate that space in natural, intuitive ways that were nearly impossible before. High-fidelity color Passthrough, innovative machine learning, and spatial understanding let you interact with virtual content and the physical world simultaneously…”.

All nice sounding improvements, but we’ll reserve judgment until we’ve actually put one through it’s sweaty paces.

Meta Quest 3 can be had for £500 with 128GB of on board storage when it releases later this year. As you’d expect, Meta Quest 2 is about to get some hefty price cuts.

Despite the decent specs of the Quest 3, the arrival of Apple into the VR market will be