Meta’s new Quest headset to start shipping on Oct 10 -Zuckerberg

By Katie Paul and Anna Tong

MENLO PARK, California (Reuters) -Meta Platforms’ newest Quest mixed-reality headset will start shipping on Oct. 10, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said at an event on Wednesday where he is expected to give an update on his plan to build an immersive metaverse, which he sees as the future of computing.

Meta first announced the Quest 3 over the summer, around the time Apple (NASDAQ:) debuted its Vision Pro headset, a high-end product with a price of $3,500.

Starting at $500, the Quest 3 boasts the same mixed-reality technology that premiered in Meta’s more expensive Quest Pro device launched last year, which shows wearers a video feed of the real world around them.

Zuckerberg spoke at the Meta Connect conference, the social media company’s biggest event of the year as well as its first in-person conference since the start of the pandemic.

The day’s announcements are expected to indicate how Zuckerberg plans to navigate the shift this year of investor fervor to artificial intelligence from augmented and virtual reality technologies.

Stakes for the event are high as investors last year slammed the parent company of Facebook (NASDAQ:) and Instagram for spending extensively on the metaverse, prompting Zuckerberg to lay off tens of thousands of staff to continue funding his vision.

Developers will be watching to assess what apps they might create for Meta’s latest hardware devices. Investors, meanwhile, will be scouting for signs of whether a gamble that has lost the company more than $40 billion since 2021 may pay off.

Just before the event, Meta said it was delivering on a plan announced early last year to roll out mobile and Web versions of its flagship social VR platform Horizon Worlds. It also quietly added legs to its previously upper-body-only virtual reality avatars, as spotted by industry blog Upload VR.