Meta's got a new $300 Quest 3s headset, and updates are coming to Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. What does it all mean? So, Meta is always looking to the future: AR, VR, AI. At the Meta Connect conference here in California, in Menlo Park, I'm getting a taste of all of it. But the updates coming to existing products are pretty incremental. There was the Quest 3 that came out last year. The Quest 3s, which is coming out October 15th, is really a more affordable update to the Quest 2 that's been around for years and just got discontinued. $300 it is clearly a really affordable VR gaming headset. The difference this time is it's got mixed reality color pass-through cameras, much like the Quest 3. It also has the same chipset as the Quest 3, so it's got better graphics and better processing speed. But what it lacks, it doesn't have the same nice high-res display, and it's using older front L lenses, not the really clear pancake lenses. Yes, I could

see a difference between the two. Still, it seems like a really nice budget headset. But the idea is that games like Batman Arkham Shadows, which is coming out, are going to be able to run on this new headset and won't be running on older headsets. Same thing with mixed reality experiences. The Ray-Bans are going to be getting a few incremental updates. One of them is that they can scan QR codes now with the cameras and bring up stuff on your phone. They can live translate languages, which I did not get to try. And they also are going to be doing some things with recognizing streams of video and using the AI to interpret it. Also didn't get to try it, but I did get to try voice-commanded deeper interaction with music like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music, where you can finally bring up track requests. Hey, Meta, play the Beetlejuice theme by Danny Elfman. Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice. Close enough. And deeper interactions when it scans an object with the cameras to kind of ask, What am I looking at? What else?

can you tell me about it? I still found that type of recognition and explanation wasn't perfect, but the coolest stuff I saw might have been from the stuff lurking in the weeds, these other AI demos. One of them allows you to scan your face with Meta's camera app on its existing AI platforms and allowed me to generate imaginary pictures of myself doing basically anything. I mean, you can do this stuff on other AI apps as well, but just the ability to do this here and have it look surprisingly good, like me in a Jets jersey or Mario on Mars or me in a giant Pokémon suit on the pools, a panda on the 4th of July. It was totally absurd. I laughed a lot. And the other thing was Gaussian splatting. If you imagine stepping into a 3D world and looking at someone's art studio or an office or maybe a theater space in the future, use multiple photographs to knit together a 3D scene, which is then streamed from the cloud to view in your

VR headset, they were really crisp and good-looking. I mean, still fuzzy when you got up close, but better even than some of these demos I'd seen in the past of similar technology. But you can't scan your own. At some point, that might happen, and at some point, they might put realistic 3D avatars into them. M is trying to figure that out. So, that's the news from Medic Connect on some of their biggest products. Really more incremental updates, affordable updates, and a couple little tweaks with the promise of other things in the future that we may still have to wait for. Thanks for watching.

Quest 3S Hands On: I Tried Meta's More Affordable VR Headset and Its New Ray-Ban AI Features

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