All the news from Meta Connect 2023

It’s happening: people are once again walking into public places wearing a video-recording face computer on their heads. Only this time, the faceputer is sold by Meta, not Google.

Say hello to Meta’s Glassholes.

David called the Meta Quest 3 “better than its predecessors in almost every way” in our full Verge review — but what’s it like on the inside? iFixit now has the answer in a brilliant teardown video that gets right up close to the gadget’s delightfully shiny guts.

You won’t find a curved battery in here like the “largely unfixable” Quest Pro, but you do get a curved heatsink above the fan — and, of course, the Time of Flight depth sensor that the Quest Pro apparently decided to scrap. iFixit’s Shahram Mokhtari says it can even attach to a Quest Pro’s board, though it’s not clear whether you could get it to work there.

On Wednesday, Meta didn’t announce an obvious killer app alongside the $499 Meta Quest 3 headset — unless you count the bundled Asgard’s Wrath 2 or Xbox Cloud Gaming in VR.

But if you watched the company’s Meta Connect keynote and developer session closely, the company revealed a bunch of intriguing improvements that could help devs build a next-gen portable headset game themselves.

Almost two years ago, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company Facebook to Meta — and since then, he has been focused on building the “metaverse,” a three-dimensional virtual reality. But the metaverse has lost some of its luster since 2021. Companies like Disney have closed down their metaverse divisions and deemphasized using the word, while crypto-based startup metaverses have quietly languished or imploded. In 2022, Meta’s Reality Labs division reported an operational loss of $13.7 billion. 

But at Meta Connect 2023, Zuckerberg still hasn’t given up on the metaverse — he’s just shifted how he talks about it. He once focused on the metaverse as a completely digital new world. Now, he aims to convince the public that the future is a blend of the digital and the physical.

Meta is releasing a charging dock for its new Quest 3 headset. For $129.99, the all-in-one charging station allows you to neatly mount and charge the Quest 3 headset and controllers when you’re not immersed in virtual reality.

This charging station is the first of its kind for Meta. While the company offers a charging dock for the Quest Pro, it is wired and doesn’t neatly prop both controllers up like the new dock. This new station is more similar to the two-in-one station Anker made for the Quest 2. It lets you charge the headset using the contact pads on the bottom of the Quest 3.

Meta announced that the Meta Quest 3 will arrive on October 10th during its Meta Connect event, providing a little clarity around the headset’s initial “fall” launch timing. Unlike its predecessor, the Quest 2, the $499.99 Quest 3 will function as both a virtual reality and mixed reality headset. That means, like Apple’s Vision Pro headset, you’ll be able to see and interact with the real world while you wear it.

How well it does outside a highly curated demo space remains to be seen, of course, and we’ll let you know after we’ve fully tested the Quest 3. In the meantime, though, you can check out our initial impressions and place a preorder for the upcoming VR headset.

Meta has just fully revealed its Quest 3 virtual reality headset and announced its Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and they’ve both got Qualcomm silicon inside. There’s a new Snapdragon XR2 Gen 2 in the Quest 3 and a new Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 in the Ray-Bans that boasts onboard AI.

We’ve known since the beginning that the Quest would feature a Snapdragon chip with double the GPU performance to drive its higher-res displays, but the Ray-Bans are a slight surprise — and so is the XR2 Gen 2’s baked-in hardware processing for head, hand, and object tracking.

Meta’s smart glasses are not called “Stories” anymore. They’re just called smart glasses now. Technically, the new model Meta just announced is called the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, and the company will happily correct you anytime you call them something else, but these are simply smart glasses. No ifs, ands, or weird names about it.

The new glasses, which Meta just announced at its Connect launch event and which are up for preorder now and will be on sale October 17th starting at $299, have two primary purposes. The first is to replace your headphones: the smart glasses have a similar personal audio system like Amazon’s Echo Frames and the Bose Tempo series, all of which play music but endeavor to make sure only you can hear it. With the new generation of glasses, Meta also upgraded the microphone system in a big way: the specs have five mics, including one in the nose bridge, which should make both your calls and voice commands much clearer. (The Stories only had one mic, and it kind of fell apart in loud or windy conditions.)

Smart glasses that can discreetly take photos and capture videos have been around for a while. Likewise, the new Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses tread a lot of familiar ground, but something about them feels fresh.

The smart glasses — which were just announced at Meta Connect — are the successor to 2021’s Ray-Ban Stories. And this time, Meta is actually putting its name on the product. You’d think that’s because it’s done something special or innovative to zhuzh up the category. I got hands-on time with the glasses a few weeks ago, and that’s not it. It was more that the tech finally started to make sense — both in terms of hardware and how the TikTok era turned normal people into overnight influencers.