Meta has just announced its latest VR headset at its Meta Connect event, the Quest 3S, which takes aim at the budget segment while making a few minor sacrifices. The Quest 3S starts at $299.99, while the Quest 3 headset carries an asking price of $500.
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The storage options still start at 128 GB, but only goes up to 256 GB for the Quest 3S, while its predecessor offered double that peak storage capacity. To go with the latest launch, Meta has also dropped the Quest 3’s asking price from $649.99 to $499.99 for the 512 GB variant.
The latest from Meta retains the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 Gen2 silicon, paired with 8 GB of RAM. On the design front, the triple vertical pill layout for the sensors on the Quest 3 has been abandoned in favor of a cleaner look that adopts clusters of three round cutouts in each lower corner. The controller layout and the strap design, on the other hand, remain identical.
Meta has watered down a few other aspects as well. You get a lower resolution (1832 x 1920 pixels, same as the Quest 2) display unit that translates to a pixel density of 773 PPI, down from the 2064 x 2208 pixel units serving 1218 PPI. Naturally, the pixel density in VR has dropped from 25PPD on the Quest 3 to 20PPD on the Quest 3S. The field of view has also been downgraded to 96-degrees (horizontal) and 90-degrees (vertical), compared to 110-degrees (horizontal) and 96-degrees (vertical) for the Quest 3 headset.
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