- Meta teased “future headsets” during its recent investor call
- Zuckerberg also suggested that Meta wants to use AI to let you watch videos.
- No definitive plans or timelines have been provided
Based on the recent layoffs, many wondered if this was the beginning of the end for Meta’s VR projects, but the company reiterated that it is still working on new technology in the field, including new hardware and possible AI integration that is truly the stuff of science fiction.
Speaking to investors following his latest quarterly earnings report, CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t talk much about virtual reality, perhaps unsurprisingly, instead focusing on smart glasses whose sales “more than tripled” last year.
Initially, this is not a good sign for the future of virtual reality. However, Meta CFO Suan Li dashed our hopes when answering a question from Deutsche Bank’s Benjamin Black on Reality Labs.
She said: “We remain optimistic about the future of virtual reality,” adding: “We are continually investing – rather in building future headsets. She said this before putting a slight damper on our hopes for VR by explaining what we already knew, which was that “consumer adoption of VR has generally grown more slowly than that of wearables, and we are rebalancing our Reality Labs portfolio to reflect that.”
No further details have been revealed about these “future headsets”, but leaks have pointed to two possible devices which would land in 2026 and/or 2027.
One would be a “Quest 4”, which is a significant but more typical upgrade from its predecessor, and would again come with a higher-end, slightly lower-end model, as we saw with the Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Then there’s the headset I’ve dubbed the Quest Pro 2. It’s ultra-lightweight – with a design more similar to glasses or goggles than a headset – thanks to the battery and computing power transferred to a puck you carry in your pocket. It would also be more focused on productivity rather than gaming.
An AI upgrade
The other major improvement we might see in VR is the emphasis on AI. Of course, that’s to be expected in the age of AI, but Zuckerberg highlighted a truly sci-fi future use case during the presentation: “There is definitely a version of the future where you can click on any video you see and navigate to it.”
The way Zuckerberg describes this future is certainly not one we’ll see next week or maybe even in the next few years, but it would be a further improvement to the AI-based tools we already see. which can transform 2D scenes into stereoscopic 3D.
Beyond VR, Zuckerberg’s comments also suggest that this could be a tool we see coming to mobile platforms – which is also now the main focus of his Horizon metaverse. Being able to generate worlds from images – from our digital memories – would be a powerful creative tool for these kinds of immersive social experiences across platforms, and could be the differentiator Meta needs as its AI models lag behind competitors such as ChatGPT, Gemini and others.
These vague hardware benchmarks and AI promises don’t give us a firm timeline for when Meta’s next VR developments will drop, but it at least hints at a next step that seems less completely miserable for us VR fans.
The question remains, however, whether Meta can regain favor, or whether upcoming devices like the Steam Frame will eat Meta’s lunch, as I suspect.
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