Facebook unveils Quest, its new virtual-reality headset

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is off to a slow start in his mission to bring virtual reality to the masses, so perhaps it’s appropriate his company’s next VR headset will be called Quest.

The headset from Facebook’s Oculus division will be a standalone device that won’t require a smartphone or a connection to a personal computer to create artificial worlds.

The Quest won’t be available until next spring, although Zuckerberg unveiled the new headset at an Oculus conference held Wednesday in San Jose, California.

Priced at $399, the Quest will cost twice as much as the less powerful, standalone Oculus Go released earlier this year. But it’s the same price as the Oculus Rift that tethers users to a PC.

Zuckerberg eventually hopes to have 1 billion people using virtually reality, but he acknowledged Wednesday that Facebook may not have even reached 1 per cent of that goal more than four years after paying $2 billion to buy Oculus.

That implies fewer than 10 million people are using Oculus products, and recent data from the research firm International Data Corp. shows the still-nascent VR market has been losing momentum.

For all of 2018, IDC predicts shipments of VR headsets and devices built for a similar technology known as augmented reality will increase 31 per cent from last year to 4.2 million.