UPDATE: Sep. 28, 2023, 4:20 p.m. EDT The Meta Quest 3 (starting at $499.99) is now available for preorder at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and in the Meta Store ahead of its official launch on Oct. 10. Target’s listing still hasn’t gone live yet.
After months of teasers by way of Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram account, Meta Quest 3 finally got an official reveal during the Meta Connect event keynote on Wednesday. Preorders are now live at Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart, and in the Meta Store ahead of its release on Tuesday, Oct. 10.
The base 128GB model is priced at $499.99 and comes with a free copy of Asgard’s Wrath 2 (an upcoming VR RPG worth $59.99). That makes the Quest 3 $200 more expensive than the 128GB Meta Quest 2, its predecessor from 2020, which dropped down to $299.99 in June.
The 512GB version of the Quest 3 retails for $649.99 and tacks on a bonus six-month Meta Quest+ subscription valued at $47.94, which gets you access to two “hand-picked” VR titles per month. They’ll stay in your library for as long as you subscribe.
Meta CEO Zuckerberg plugged the Quest 3 as “the first mainstream mixed-reality headset” and “the most powerful Meta Quest yet” during the Meta Connect livestream. It runs on a new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 processor for faster load times and crisper details in heavy games; that’s said to have twice the graphic processing power of the Quest 2’s chipset.
The Quest 3 also has a new pancake lens design featuring two 90Hz LCD displays at 2064 x 2208 pixels per eye, plus two RGB cameras that support full-color Passthrough. (This feature made a great first impression on Mashable tech and games reporter Alex Perry.) Even with these upgrades, it’s sleeker and 40 percent thinner than the Quest 2.
The Quest 3 ships with two new Touch Plus controllers, which have an updated ring-free design and immersive haptic feedback functionality.
