Meta is launching its next VR headset in October at the company's Connect conference. CEO Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement Thursday night in an equally surreal setting: the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on Spotify.
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He said the new VR headset, a follow-up to the popular Oculus 2, will focus on “social presence,” with features like eye-tracking and face-tracking. Zuckerberg said the headset is designed to capture users’ facial expressions and project them onto their avatars in real time to enhance nonverbal communication. He also noted that while Meta’s AR glasses are a few years away, the headset, which will launch in October, will have some mixed reality features.
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At last year’s Connect conference, Meta teased a high-end headset codenamed “Project Cambria,” and according to Zuckerberg’s description, the headset that launched in October is its final consumer version. A report from Bloomberg last month noted that code in Meta’s companion iPhone app for VR headsets indicated that the upcoming headset would be called the Meta Quest Pro.
On Joe Rogan's podcast, Zuckerberg repeatedly emphasized the fact that VR can "unlock" the feeling of being in the presence of another person.
"When you're on a video call, you don't actually feel like you're there with the person. For me, what virtual reality is that it really convinces your brain that you're there [in person]," he said.
Since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta, the company has recast the entire company as a “metaverse” business rather than a social media, positioning its strategy as one of creating a world of multiple, virtual worlds for all users. Some may be skeptical of the motivation behind the messaging axis, but the company has moved forward and made efforts to better combine the different kinds of experiences it develops.
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Meta's announcement comes weeks after the company raised the price of the Oculus 2 from $299 to $399. While there's no word on the price of the upcoming headset, Zuckerberg described it as "a pretty big step up from the Oculus 2," so it will cost well over $400.
Information source: techcrunch.com
