UPDATE: The Meta Quest 3 is now available to pre-order ahead of its release on October 10th.
ORIGINAL STORY: Here’s something that you don’t see every day. The Meta Quest 3 is due to be fully revealed later tonight, after it was announced that it would launch this Spring for $829.99 earlier this year, but it’s had a stealth price drop before it’s even properly revealed.
At the time of writing, the Meta Quest 3 website now lists it as starting at $799.95 AUD for the 128GB version (its said that a larger storage model is also on the way). This is $30 cheaper than previously listed, and very in-line with the $499.99 USD price tag which converts to just a little under $800.
In other EU countries such as the UK, the price also dropped on the website, with the US price sticking strong.
Even with the lowered price, and it coming in well below the likes of PlayStation VR2 and the Apple Vision Pro, it’s still a big, big jump from the Meta Quest 2 that launched at a very, very good price of $479 AUD before the price jumped up.
We’ll have all the information on the Meta Quest 3 tomorrow morning including release date and hopefully the games that will be launching alongside the system.
The actual unit will be 40% slimmer than the Meta Quest 2 which should make for a much more comfortable headset. The controllers look extremely different, dropping the outer rings and also adding the TruTouch haptics that were found in the Touch pro controllers this year.
The most exciting advancement is the fact that the Meta Quest 3 has dual 4MP RGB colour cameras, meaning that it’ll provide mixed reality experiences. Meta says that it has 10x more pixels in passthrough compared to that of the Meta Quest 2.
As far as performance goes, the headset will combine the highest resolution yet as well as pancake optics to make the visuals look better than ever. It will also be the first headset to feature a Snapdragon chipset that has twice the graphical performance of the Snapdragon GPU found in the Quest 2.
The Quest 3 will be fully backwards compatible with the Quest 2 catalogue of over 500 VR games. Meta has said that more information is coming at Oculus Connect on September 27th.