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Quest 3HardwareVPSPreparationMeta

Preparing VPS for Quest 3

Quest 3's improved hardware creates opportunities for VPS - better cameras, more compute, and MR-first design.

Evyatar Bluzer
3 min read

The Quest 3 spec that matters most to me is the price: roughly $499, against Quest Pro's $1499. It launches later this year, the first item on the 2023 product list, the hardware is better across the board, and 3x more users means 3x more VPS queries.

Hardware Improvements

AspectQuest ProQuest 3
PassthroughColor, lower resColor, higher res
ComputeXR2 Gen 1XR2 Gen 2
CamerasGoodBetter low-light
Price$1499~$499

Better passthrough and more compute both help, but the price point is what changes the shape of the problem.

VPS Upgrades for Quest 3

Better Input

Higher-resolution passthrough gives us more features per image and better feature quality, which feeds straight into matching accuracy. We expect a 15% reduction in localization error from this alone.

More Compute

XR2 Gen 2 buys faster feature extraction - 30ms down to 20ms - along with room for more sophisticated models and continuous operation at lower power.

MR-First

Quest 3 is designed around MR rather than treating it as an add-on to VR. That makes VPS more central to the user experience, tightens the platform integration, and puts first-party MR apps on top of VPS.

What breaks at Quest 3 scale?

Quest Pro was expected to sell around 100K units. Quest 3 is expected to sell millions. Last March I wrote that Quest Pro would put VPS pre-installed on millions of devices, and at launch I said it again. A hundred thousand is not millions. The installed base I was counting on is the one Quest 3 has to create. That accessibility translates directly into load: the infrastructure has to handle 10x the query volume, 10x the map data, and 10x the developer demand. The scaling work is ongoing.

What Quest 3 hardware changes for VPSThree rows of two boxes joined by a labeled arrow; the bottom-right box, tenfold load, is highlighted. Higher-res passthroughXR2 Gen 2 compute~$499 price(Quest Pro: $1499)15% less localization errorFeature extraction30 ms down to 20 ms10x queries, 10x map data,10x developer demand more features per image faster extraction, lower power millions of units, not 100K
What Quest 3 changes for VPS: passthrough and compute each buy a measured gain, and the price buys the installed base that turns into tenfold load; the numbers are this post's estimates.

New Features for Launch

Instant localization comes in under 100ms when the map is on device. Semantic anchors let a developer say "attach to table" instead of "attach at coordinate". Shared experiences put multiple devices in the same VPS space. And developers get a self-serve mapping portal.

Timeline

Architecture updates complete in Q1, integration with Quest 3 firmware in Q2, beta testing and optimization through Q3, launch with Quest 3 in Q4. On track, but tight.

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