Meta is about to get a new virtual reality headset
What is at stake in the future of the Metaverse? Why the Horizon Worlds app is not a “metaverse” as an advance to virtual reality
“Being a cynic about new and innovative technology is easy,” Mr. Stone said. “Actually building it is a lot harder — but that’s what we’re doing because we believe the metaverse is the future of computing.”
With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta’s flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and cost slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don’t fully immerse the wearer, thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world. Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets to date, Mark Rabkin, the company’s vice president for VR, told employees during the presentation.
Meta said in February that its Horizon Worlds game had grown to roughly 300,000 monthly active users — an increase from a few months earlier, but minuscule in comparison with Facebook’s more than 2.9 billion monthly active users. The company declined to provide more up-to-date figures for Horizon Worlds.
There is a lot at stake during Connect today, in particular, the future of the Quest Pro as an advancement to the market for virtual reality. Meta knows its flagship metaverse app, Horizon Worlds, is riddled with software bugs and underused by even its own employees, so any updates to that platform will also be notable.
And while Meta is thrusting metaverse experiences onto users, it’s kind of ignoring that core gamer audience and not doing a whole lot to build it. Beat Saber, arguably VR’s killer app, is four years old, and no other VR game has really captured the zeitgeist in a similar fashion. People don’t see their friends play games like Pistol Whip and buy a second game. If they did, I wouldn’t be writing this blog. The platform doesn’t have a game that drives adoption.
The Meta Connect event will be streamed online for everyone to watch. If you have a Quest 2, you can also watch it in virtual reality. The Verge will be covering the event as it happens, which kicks off at 10AM PT / 1PM ET.
I am, to put it mildly, a “metaverse” skeptic. The term entered common parlance, but companies like Meta, Facebook that promote it most heavily are not very good at building. However, I’m open minded. When my editor brought up the idea of me spending holidays in the metaverse, I was down to give it a try.
The idea was simple. The companies claim that their platforms will bring people together. Well, the holidays would be a perfect time to test this. It’s a good time for friends and family to get together, often involving people from other states. If ever there was an opportunity for new tech to connect physically distant people … well, it would be March 2020. The holidays are close to being the second.
The platform we decided to use was Meta’s Horizon Worlds. This is a result of the experiment being started from the beginning. If the goal was simply putting different people together in the same virtual room, that exists! We’ve spent a whole pandemic in Zoom calls and Discord parties and Animal Crossing.
Did I Really Want to Spend the Holidays in VR? Not a Totally Virtual Reality, But a Few Does It Make You Feel Like It
I asked everyone I could think of to help me with this experiment. I asked friends, I asked partners, I asked family. I asked the people who lived thousands of miles away, and the people who lived down the street. It wasn’t just that no one was willing to do the experiment with me. It’s that no one could.
Though willingness was in short supply, as well. One of my dearest friends said she would be willing to help with this experiment because she will not be able to see me for the holidays. Grudgingly. The idea wasn’t appealing on its own, though. I feel like Virtual-reality would be a reminder that you’re not here. Still, she agreed to try it out in principle—but she couldn’t because, like everyone else I knew, she didn’t own a headset.
I’m probably not alone, maybe I was just unlucky. Hard data is a little hard to pin down—in part because many polls lump together owning a VR headset with merely using one—but one survey from eMarketer released in 2021 estimated that by this year, only 31.3 million people in the US would “experience VR content” once a month in VR. That’s not a virtual reality headset.
The Challenge of Mixed Reality for the Meta Quest 3 and La Jolla, and Implications for the Next Generation of Augmented Reality Glasses
Meta’s first true pair of AR glasses, which the company has been internally developing for 8 years under the codename Orion, are more technically advanced, expensive, and designed to project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world. Himel said that there will be an internal launch for employees to try out the glasses. Meta will launch a line of augmented reality glasses for early adopters, as well as a series of less advanced smart glasses and a second generation of its neural watch, before it is made available to the public.
According to Rabkin, the primary challenge for Meta with the Quest 3 will be convincing people to pay a bit more for it. He told employees Tuesday that they needed to get enthusiasts fired up about it. We have to show people that the new features are worth it.
Rabkin said that mixed reality will be a big selling point, and that there will be a new smart guardian to help wearers navigate their real world while wearing the device. “The main north star for the team was from the moment you put on this headset, the mixed reality has to make it feel better, easier, more natural,” he said. You can walk through your house without a problem. You can put anchors and things on your desktop. You have the right to take your coffee. You can stay there a long time.
There will be 41 new apps and games shipping for the Quest 3, including new mixed reality experiences to take advantage of the updated hardware, Rabkin said. In 2024, he said that Meta plans to ship a more “accessible” headset codenamed Ventura. The goal for this headset is to have the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the consumer market.
Rabkin didn’t say whether a second generation of the recent Meta Quest Pro, which received poor reviews from The Verge and others, is coming anytime soon. The closest to what sounds like a successor will be “way out in the future” after Ventura in 2024, when Meta is planning its most advanced headset codenamed La Jolla featuring photorealistic, codec avatars.
“We want to make it higher resolution for work use and really nail work, text and things like that,” Rabkin said about La Jolla. “We want to take a lot of the comfort things from Quest Pro and how it sits on your head and the split architecture and bring that in for comfort.”
Meanwhile, he acknowledged that the current Quest is struggling to keep new users engaged. “Right now, we’re on our third year of Quest 2,” he told employees. “And sadly, the newer cohorts that are coming in, the people who bought it this last Christmas, they’re just not as into it” or engaged as “the ones who bought it early.”
Rabkin pushed employees to make the sharing of VR content on other platforms “trivial,” redesign the Quest store to make it more “dynamic,” and give developers the ability to do things like automated promotions.
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“We need to be better at growth and retention and resurrection,” he said. “We need to be better at social and actually make those things more reliable, more intuitive so people can count on it.”
Himel said that the third generation of the smart glasses would have a display that would let you view incoming text messages, ScanQR codes, and translate text from another language in real time. The glasses will come with a “neural interface” band that allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad. He said that eventually, the band will allow the wearer to type at the same rate as what mobile phones allow, with a virtual keyboard.
Himel laid out the market opportunity around almost two billion pairs of glasses and hundreds of millions of watches. “If we can put on shelves a great product at a great price with the right value, we believe we can get into these upgrade cycles and have a lot of growth of our devices,” he told the room. It is up to us to deliver.
Meta wants to use its existing business model to make money off of these future devices. Himel said the company thinks it can make more money per user by selling virtual goods and optional add-ons, as well as by selling augmented reality ads.
He said they should be able to run a good business. If you have augmented reality glasses on, you can see ads in space. It’s our ability to track conversions that should be close to 100 percent, where we have focused a lot.
He said it would be a great business if we hit anything close to projections. A business that is unlike anything we have seen before.
Price Cuts and Expectations for the QUEST 2 and 3: Is There a Case for Mid-Infrared Selling a Mixed Reality Console?
Meta says its goal is to “create hardware that’s affordable for as many people as possible” and that it’s lowering the Pro’s price to make its tech “available to even more businesses and professionals around the world.”
The company says the high-end headset isn’t getting a follow-up for at least a few years. If the company is trying to get rid of its existing inventory, a price drop of that magnitude makes sense.
For the US and Canada, the price of the Quest Pro will be lowered on March 5th, and on March 15th everywhere else it is sold. There will be a price cut on the 5th in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the US.
It’s a slightly more confusing situation for the 256GB Quest 2, which has been pretty successful since it launched in 2020. The 128 gigabytes version is still available despite the fact that Meta raised the price by $100 in August of last year. (Meta doesn’t really explain why it’s not lowering the price for that version.) It is hard to imagine many people going for lower tier options if it costs $30 more to double the storage. Also, Meta’s adjustment for the now $429 256GB model almost knocks it back down to where it was before the hike, which happened less than a year ago.
The successor to theQUEST 2 is due out this year and will be slightly more expensive than theQUEST 2. The Quest 3 is expected to be a major improvement with a design that is significantly thinner and at least twice as powerful. Meta may be trying to set up some pricing strategy that makes sense if it keeps selling the Quest 2 or if it transitions to using a headset in its lineup.
If the goal is to build an audience for mixed reality than gaming is likely to be the answer, because the current headset is not doing very well and the price has just been dropped five months after launch. A fourth headset is expected in 2024 that will ideally “pack the biggest punch we can at the most attractive price point in the VR consumer market,” Rabkin said. It sounds like we will be stuck with a priceygame console that wants to take us on a journey that no one is interested in yet.
Do You Want to Take Anything Away? How Microsoft Invented the XBOX One Computer and Its Plans for a Home Theater Computer
If possible, avoid destroying the user value even if there are only ten thousand active users. If you take something away from a user that is dear to them, your company will suffer more harm than if you give them another thing of equal value.
Carmack is the former consulting CTO at Meta. He also helped build the video game industry and created massive, enduring hits like Doom, Quake, and Wolfenstein 3D. Unlike Meta, Carmack seems to get that telling people you’re going to take away their games to free up bandwidth to work on a metaverse no one especially wants yet is a bad idea.
Microsoft focused on something new and different instead of games when it launched the XBOX One, as was similar to what it is planning for the console. That device had an IR blaster. It has a cable line in it so you can use it as a box. The Xbox One was given as a home theater computer and also played games. And the gamers just went and bought the Playstation 4 instead.
