Meta Platforms kicked off its annual Connect conference at its California headquarters on Wednesday, unveiling a new entry-level version of its Quest series of mixed-reality headsets, as well as a slew of software enhancements to its AI assistant that are driving interest in its Ray-Ban Meta smartglasses.
The Quest 3S, which is due to be released on October 15th, will be available in two storage capacity sizes, with the smaller one priced at $299.99 and the other at $399.99.
With this launch, the company will discontinue production of the older Quest 2 and higher-end Quest Pro devices and will cut the price of the more powerful Quest 3, introduced last year, from $649.99 to $499.99.
The Facebook owner is also expected to preview its first augmented reality glasses and announce updates to its existing virtual reality and artificial intelligence products.
Among the AI updates announced is an audio upgrade for the digital assistant called Meta AI, which will respond to voice commands and give users the option to make the assistant sound like celebrities like Judi Dench or John Cena.
“We think voice will be a more natural way to interact with AI than text,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said.
The augmented reality announcement was a long time in the making for Zuckerberg, who positioned the AR tech as a kind of crown jewel when he first pivoted the world's largest social media company in 2021 toward building an immersive “metaverse” system.
But Meta has struggled to overcome technical challenges with the AR project since then, with the head of the company's metaverse-oriented Reality Labs division admitting last year that a market-ready product is “still years away, to say the least.”
The company is pouring tens of billions of dollars into investing in artificial intelligence, augmented reality and other metaverse technologies, and has raised its capital spending forecast for 2024 to a record high of $37 billion to $40 billion.
The company's metaverse division, Reality Labs, lost $8.3 billion in the first half of this year, according to its latest disclosures, after losing $16 billion last year.
The social media giant plans to distribute the first generation of the glasses only internally and to a select group of developers this year, with each device costing tens of thousands of dollars to manufacture, according to sources familiar with the project.
Meta aims to ship the first commercial AR glasses to consumers in 2027, by which point technological innovation should bring down production costs, the sources said.
The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the company's plans.
Zuckerberg seemed to endorse that approach, explaining the AR effort and telling an audience at a live recording of the Acquired podcast in San Francisco that Meta is “very close to being able to show off its first prototype.”
Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the plans.
Meanwhile, Meta, with its camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, has had some unexpected tentative success on the road to AR.
Riding the wave of excitement around emerging generative AI technology, the company announced at its Connect conference last year that it would add an AI-powered digital assistant to its glasses, turning the once-forgotten device into the most popular AI wearable on the market.
Meta doesn't disclose smart glasses sales figures, but the CEO of Ray-Ban maker Essilor-Luxottica said this summer that more pairs of the new generation of glasses had been sold in a few months than the previous generation had been sold in two years. Market research firm IDC estimates that more than 700,000 pairs of glasses have been shipped since last year's update.
Meta recently extended its partnership with EssilorLuxottica and is considering investing in the eyewear company, spurring speculation that the AR glasses may also carry the Ray-Ban name. In the more immediate future, Meta's roadmap for smart glasses also includes plans for the next generation to feature a viewfinder that can display basic text and images through the lens.
The company has shipped software updates this year that enhance the capabilities of its existing glasses' AI assistant, including an update in April that allows the agent to identify objects the wearer looks at and converse with them.
