The recent layoffs had many wondering if this was the beginning of the end for Meta’s VR projects, but the company reiterated that it is still working on new technologies in the field, including new hardware and a possible AI integration that is truly the stuff of science fiction.
After his latest news, he spoke to investors quarterly earnings reportNot surprisingly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t talked much about virtual reality, instead focusing on smart glasses, sales of which have “more than tripled” in the last year.
First of all, this is not a good sign for the future of virtual reality. However, Meta CFO Suan Li dashed our hopes. answer a question by Benjamin Black of Deutsche Bank in Reality Labs.
He said: “We remain optimistic about the future of virtual reality,” adding: “We continue to invest, rather in building future headsets.” She said this before slightly dampening our hopes for VR by explaining what we already knew, namely that “consumer adoption of VR has generally grown more slowly than that of wearable devices, and we are realigning our Reality Labs portfolio to reflect this.”
No further details were revealed about these “future headphones,” but leaks suggested two possible devices that would launch in 2026 and/or 2027.
One of them would be a “Quest 4,” which would be a significant but more typical improvement over its predecessor, again featuring a higher and slightly lower priced model, as we saw with the Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Then there are the headphones, which I’ve called the Quest Pro 2. They’re ultralight, with a design that looks more like glasses than headphones, thanks to the battery and processing power transferred to a puck that you carry in your pocket. Additionally, the focus would be more on productivity than gaming.
An AI improvement
The other big improvement we could see in virtual reality is the emphasis on AI. Of course, this is to be expected in the age of AI, but Zuckerberg highlighted a real sci-fi use case for the future during the presentation: “There is definitely a version of the future where you can tap any video you see and jump to it.”
The way Zuckerberg describes this future is certainly not what we’ll see next week or maybe even in the next few years, but it would be a further improvement over the AI-based tools we’re already seeing. which can convert 2D scenes into stereoscopic 3D.
Beyond virtual reality, Zuckerberg’s comments also suggest that this could be a tool that we believe will come to mobile platforms, which is now also the main focus of its Horizon metaverse. The ability to generate worlds from images (from our digital memories) would be a powerful creative tool for these types of immersive social experiences across platforms and could be the differentiator Meta needs as its AI models lag behind competitors like ChatGPT, Gemini and others.
These vague hardware benchmarks and AI promises don’t give us an exact timeline for when Meta’s next VR developments will arrive, but they at least hint at a next step that looks less miserable to us VR fans.
However, the question remains whether Meta can regain favor or if upcoming devices like the Steam Frame will eat Meta’s lunch, as I suspect.
