Along with the announcement of the Orion AR smart glasses, Meta has also unveiled a new version of the Quest 3 headset, the Meta Quest 3S. This announcement comes after months of speculation regarding Meta’s plans for a more accessible VR option but does not include the pancake lens or support 4K content.
The Quest 3S maintains much of the same technology found in the Quest 3, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor and 8GB of RAM, enabling it to support movie as well as game titles such as the upcoming Batman: Arkham Shadow that comes free with the headset. It also features full-colour passthrough capabilities for mixed reality applications and comes with the same controllers as its predecessor.
Unreal experiences. Unreal price. The Meta Quest 3S starts at $299.99. https://t.co/S0PiBVJVpN pic.twitter.com/CMnkxy4dqd
— Meta Quest (@MetaQuestVR) September 25, 2024
Since the Quest 3S does not include the pancake lenses, the company reverted back to the Fresnel lenses that were used in the Meta Quest 2. This results in a resolution of 1832 x 1920 pixels per eye and a slightly reduced field-of-view compared to the standard Quest 3. The external sensors and cameras appear unchanged, featuring two RGB cameras for colour passthrough and four VGA cameras for tracking.
The headset only offers 128GB in its base model, far less than the 512GB model of the original Quest 3. A 256GB option is now also available for US$400 (~RM1,651), while the price of the 512GB Quest 3 has been reduced to US$500 (~RM2,065), down from US$650 (~RM2,684).
The Quest 3S is priced at US$300 (~RM1,242) and pre-orders are now open on Meta’s official website, and will ship out 15 October. As Meta rolls out this new model, it’ll phase out the older Quest 2 and Quest Pro headsets. As far as local availability is concerned, local distributor Liang VR posted on its Facebook page that a display showing session will soon be underway.
