Enlarge / For just $199, you could be having as much fun as this paid model.

Meta has announced it's permanently lowering the price of its aging Quest 2 headset to $199 for a 128GB base model, representing the company's lowest price yet for a full-featured untethered VR headset.

The Quest 2, which launched in 2020 at $299 , famously defied tech product convention by increasing its MSRP to $399 amid inflation and supply chain issues in mid-2022. Actual prices for the headset at retail have fallen since then, though; Best Buy offered new units for $299 as of last October and for $250 by the 2023 post-Thanksgiving shopping season , for instance.

And the Quest 2 is far from the company's state-of-the-art headset at this point. Meta launched the surprisingly expensive Quest Pro in late 2022 before dropping that headset's price from $1,499 to $999 less than five months later . And last year's launch of the Quest 3 at a $499 starting price brought some significant improvements in resolution, processing power, thickness, and full-color passthrough images over the Quest 2.

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  All the available Immersive Video launch content fit on a small strip in the TV app. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Tonight, Apple will debut some new Immersive Video content for the Vision Pro headset—the first sports content for the device. It doesn't seem like much after two months of no new content, though.

Starting at 6 pm PT/9 pm ET, Vision Pro users will be able to watch a sports film captured for the platform's Immersive Video format. The video will be a series of highlights from last year's Major League Soccer (MLS) playoffs, and according to Six Colors , it will run just five minutes. It will be free for all Vision Pro users.

On February 2, Apple released what appeared to be the first episodes of three Immersive Video series: Adventure , Prehistoric Planet , and Wildlife . Each debuted alongside the Vision Pro's launch with one episode labeled "Episode 1" of "Season 1."

Enlarge / PSVR2 (left) next to the original PSVR. (credit: Kyle Orland / Ars Technica)

It looks like Sony's PlayStation VR2 is not living up to the company's sales expectations just over a year after it first hit the market . Bloomberg reports that the PlayStation-maker has stopped producing new PSVR2 units as it tries to clear out a growing backlog of unsold inventory.

Bloomberg cites "people familiar with [Sony's] plans" in reporting that PSVR2 sales have "slowed progressively" since its February 2023 launch. Sony has produced "well over 2 million" units of the headset, compared to what tracking firm IDC estimates as just 1.69 million unit shipments to retailers through the end of last year. The discrepancy has caused a "surplus of assembled devices... throughout Sony’s supply chain," according to Bloomberg's sources.

IDC estimates a quarterly low of 325,000 PSVR2 units shipped in the usually hot holiday season, compared to a full 1.3 million estimated holiday shipments for Meta's then-new Quest 3 headset , which combined with other Quest products to account for over 3.7 million estimated sales for the full year.

Enlarge (credit: Floogle/X)

Nintendo has made some bold, weird choices with its hardware designs. But none were so bold and weird as 1995's Virtual Boy, a "woefully premature commercial curio," as one Ars writer put it , that "quickly passed unlamented into history," as remarked another . The awkward red-on-black tabletop headset system wasn't so much ahead of its time as beamed in from an alternate reality. In this reality, it didn't sell much and was largely forgotten.

Nintendo has seemed eager to let the Virtual Boy fade from the collective memory , but clever coders have labored to keep the system accessible outside vintage hardware collections. The latest, and perhaps most accessible, is Red Viper , which plays Virtual Boy games on a ( lightly hacked ) Nintendo 3DS, the other Nintendo system on which 3D features were underappreciated. It is full-speed, it supports homebrew games, you can change the drawing color to something other than red, and it is free. It's built on top of the work of earlier 3DS emulator r3dragon , which itself drew heavily from the Reality Boy project for Windows .

Red Viper makes use of the 3DS's top screen for game display and turns the lower screen into a system options panel. It maps the Virtual Boy's own face buttons onto the touchscreen. In the Twitter thread announcing Red Viper's general release, coder Floogle notes that the emulator is only roughly translating the Virtual Boy's 50 Hz refresh to the 3DS' 60 Hz by pushing a frame every 20 ms. There is, Floogle supposes, some hardware headroom for improvement.

Enlarge / Important note: You (probably) will not look this good when using the C-Infinity. (credit: Neurosync)

Anyone who has spent significant time trying to traverse large spaces in virtual reality knows that it can sometimes be a nauseating experience. The mismatch between a vestibular system telling your body it's standing still and a VR headset telling your eyes that you're moving often causes an almost instant upset stomach for many VR users.

For years, VR games and experiences have tried to mitigate this problem with software tricks, such as movement by "teleportation" and "snap" turning that jumps in sharp, discrete angles. But these solutions come with their own problems for games in which smoother walking motion and free rotation are important.

Rather than focusing on software, Neurosync has decided to use hardware to try to solve this problem. The company's C-Infinity "VR Locomotion Platform" (which is currently wrapping up a successful Kickstarter campaign ) promises to "effectively reduc[e] motion sickness while delivering an unparalleled true sense of movement... while also reducing fatigue."

Enlarge / Look into my eyes... all three of them. (credit: Meta)

You'd be forgiven for not realizing that the Quest 3 is actually the fourth headset in Meta's popular Quest line. In fact, Meta would probably prefer that everyone forget about last year's ill-considered Quest Pro , which paired a handful of minor improvements with an absolutely massive $1,500 starting price. Even a quick price drop to $1,000 couldn't save this over-engineered stopgap gadget.

What a difference a year makes—or three years, for VR aficionados who wisely stuck with 2020's Quest 2 until now. The Quest 3 offers distinct improvements over previous Quest headsets in the areas that matter most (resolution, form factor, etc.) without many of the Pro's more expensive, heavy, and least necessary indulgences (eye-tracking cameras, rechargeable controllers, charging dock, etc.). The Quest 3 also offers a usable (but rough) suite of new mixed-reality features, providing an intriguing glimpse of a world where VR content is routinely layered over our view of reality.

Most importantly, the Quest 3 does this all at a mass-market price (starting at $500) and in a way that ensures continuity with Quest's existing software. While there's nothing here that will usher in the long-sought virtual reality revolution , this is the kind of incremental improvement the space needs if it's going to continue to increase the size of its niche .

Enlarge / The Quest 3 release date is unveiled at the Meta Connect conference.

Following a small tease in July , Meta has announced an October 10 release date for its Quest 3 headset. The follow-up to 2020's hot-selling Quest 2 and 2022's overpriced Quest Pro will start at $499 for a 128GB model or $649 for a 512GB model.

The lower-end model comes bundled with a copy of Asgard's Wrath 2 (available in winter 2023), while the higher-end model also includes a six-month subscription to the Meta Quest+ software subscription service .

The new headset upgrades the Snapdragon XR2 line powering previous Quest headsets to a "Gen 2" chipset, according to specs posted online . That means double the processing power and 30 percent more total resolution than Quest 2 (2064×2208 pixels per eye; 25 pixels per degree). The Quest 3 also sports 8GB of RAM, up from the 6GB of the Quest 2 but down from the 12GB on the Quest Pro.

Enlarge / Is this the new face of the tabletop RPG player? Demeo maker Resolution Games thinks it might be.

Resolution Games today announced that a version of Demeo —the developer's popular virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) tabletop RPG simulator—is in "active development" for the Apple Vision Pro headset. The title is among the first VR/MR games to be officially confirmed for Apple's highly anticipated $3,500 wearable computing device , which is expected early next year.

After Demeo 's launch in 2021 , Resolution Games added a Mixed Reality update late last year that places in-game objects on top of a view of the real world (via passthrough cameras on compatible headsets like Meta's Quest 2 and Quest Pro and the upcoming Quest 3 ). A "Mixed Reality 2.0" update for the game, launching today, adds support for controller-free hand-tracking as well as "co-location" of mixed reality items, which can now appear in the same place for multiple users in the same physical room.

Those kinds of MR features will be useful on the Apple Vision Pro, which doesn't use handheld controllers and is primarily focused on MR apps that can be layered over a view of the real world. But Resolution Games says Vision Pro will also support a "fully virtual" version of the game that doesn't integrate passthrough images.