Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 headset is slated for a Fall 2023 launch, possibly even at the company’s Connect developer conference coming September 27th. It seems Meta has suffered yet another unauthorized pre-launch unboxing of their hardware, echoing the Quest Pro leak from last year.
The video in question was posted to Reddit today, and subsequently captured and reposted in full by X (formerly Twitter) user ‘VR Panda. Alex From CHN’ before it was deleted by the original Reddit poster.
In the video, we get a brief (if not anticlimactic) glimpse at what appears to be the Quest 3 headset and Touch controllers. There’s not much else to say here: it definitely looks like Quest 3, floppy headstrap and all.
Meta announced Quest 3 back in June, just days prior to the reveal of Apple Vision Pro. Meta’s upcoming mixed reality headset is launching this fall for the starting price of $500, bringing with it much of the color passthrough functionality of the pricier Quest Pro, which sells for double the price.
At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the company’s next standalone headset “[t]he first mainstream headset with high-res color mixed reality,” also touting it for its slimmer and lighter profile.
The headset, which integrates pancake optics instead of the Quest 2’s Fresnel lenses, is said to be “40% thinner” than Quest 2 when measuring without the foam facial interface.
Unboxing leak notwithstanding, we’re sure to learn more about Meta’s launch strategy at Connect in late September, and what games the company will highlight to make best use of the headset’s mixed reality capabilities.