The next Meta Quest headset due out this year will be thinner, twice as powerful and slightly more expensive than the Quest 2. That’s according to a leaked internal hardware roadmap presentation obtained from The Virgin This also includes plans for high-end smartband-controlled, advertising-supported AR glasses by 2027.
“Quest 3” will also feature a new “Smart Guardian” system that will let users walk around safely in “mixed reality,” the presentation said. This will precede a more “accessible” headset codenamed Ventura, which is slated for release in 2024 at “the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market.”
This Ventura description is reminiscent of John Carmack’s October Meta Connect keynote, in which he highlighted his push for a “super affordable, super light headset” that targets “$250 and 250 grams”. Carmack complained that Meta “isn’t building this headset today, but I’ll keep trying.” Months later, Carmack announced he was leaving the company, complaining that he was “obviously not convincing enough” to change the company for the better.
A third planned Meta VR headset, codenamed La Jolla, planned after Ventura “from the future” will have enough power and resolution the company’s long-planned, photorealistic “codec avatars.” According to a presentation by Meta VP for VR Mark Rabkin, this headset will be similar to the Quest Pro in terms of “how it sits on your head” and its focus on “work usage… text and such.”
Put Facebook on your face
However, all of these VR-focused headsets may just be a stepping stone on Meta’s planned path to what it bills as revolutionary see-through augmented reality goggles. The company intends to continue to build on this path for the time being the 2021 release of the Rayban Stories glassesprimarily focused on simple voice commands and smartphone integration with a built-in camera.
By 2025, this basic design will have evolved into glasses with an integrated display that can display incoming text messages or translate text in real time. These goggles will also use a proposed “neural interface band”. The smartwatch style wrist device that Meta has demonstrated in the pastwill be able to read wrist and finger movements to enable features like virtual D-pads and keyboards floating in the air.
These goggles are in a separate product line from a more advanced, pricier AR goggle, codenamed Orion, which Meta says is designed for projecting high-quality holograms onto the real world. The glasses, which aren’t scheduled for release until 2027, will rely in part on ads projected onto a user’s view of the real world.
“I think it’s easy to imagine how ads would appear in space if you’re wearing AR glasses,” said Alex Himel, Meta VP for AR, according to The Verge a lot of focus as a company, should also be close to 100 percent. “
That sounds more than a little worrying coming from a company known for the creepier side of ad tracking technology. But who knows – 10 years from now, Meta’s amazing AR glasses might make it as weird to fish a smartphone out of your pocket dozens of times a day as if you were using a phone booth.
News about Meta’s VR/AR product plans comes from the company lost more than $1 billion a month through its VR/AR-focused Reality Labs division in 2022 and a few months after the company laid off 13 percent of its workforce to realize some recent investments hadn’t paid off.
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