Reducing weight and increasing performance are two of the most important factors in pushing standalone XR headsets forward. While Meta has shown off its own Orion AR glasses prototype using a wireless compute unit, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth doesn’t think a similar setup is the magic bullet for standalone VR gaming.

Bosworth, who is also head of the company’s Reality Labs XR team, held another one of his Instagram Q&As earlier this week, where he typically delves into a wide variety of topics—some professional, some personal.

In the latest session, Bosworth expounded on the subject of wireless compute units, and how the company thinks they aren’t the right fit for its standalone VR headsets.

Meta Quest 3S | Image courtesy Meta

“We have looked at this a bunch of times. Wireless compute pucks just really don’t solve the problem. If you’re wireless, they still have a battery on the headset, which is a major driver of weight. And, sure, you’re gaining some thermal space so your performance could potentially be better, although you’re somewhat limited now by bandwidth because you’re using a radio,” Bosworth says.

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Technical hurdles aside, Meta is primarily focused on building something accessible to consumers, with its latest Quest 3S selling for as low as $300 for the 128GB version. Bosworth continues:

“You’ve increased your cost dramatically, because even if your major silicon is in the wireless compute puck, you still need quite a bit of silicon to just power the displays and do the local corrections required there, and handle the stream of data. So it really ends up … the math doesn’t work, is what I’m saying. And it doesn’t end up saving you that much weight and dramatically increases your cost and complexity.”

Meta’s Orion AR Glasses Prototype | Image courtesy Meta

This comes in contrast to Meta’s Orion prototype, which does incorporate a wireless compute unit. Granted, Orion isn’t going to be productized due to its enormous cost—a reported $10,000 per-unit owing to its difficult-to-produce silicon carbide lenses, however it’s clear that in some cases wireless pucks do make sense—namely in delivering less immersive graphics to AR glasses.

Then again, Bosworth has said its first pair of AR glasses for consumers won’t hit at that Quest price-point when they land at some point in the future. Bosworth said back in September that such a device is “not going to be cheap,” noting however the company aims to make them accessible “at least in the space of phone, laptop territory.”

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Sofian

    We need something like Valve s base stations that would transmit energy to the headset instead of data, or both.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      The problem with wireless energy transfer is that energy loss grows with distance to the power of three when using a point-source like a light bulb or a wireless router. Which is why wireless charging usually requires placing for example a phone on a mat to shorten distance.

      The alternative is using a focused beam. Connecting a WiFi card to a narrow focus antenna/Pringles can allows to extend the range to dozens of kilometers and more. And there are concepts for capturing solar power on satellites and transferring the energy back to earth with a laser or maser (using microwaves), but this usually requires fixed positions and/or continuous tracking and adjusting direction.

      You certainly could do that with a headset too, with image recognition used to always track and aim at the headset. But pointing a powerful laser/maser at your head sounds like a much less safe method to achieve longer play sessions than hot-swappable lithium batteries with only a very, very slim chance of ever catching fire. A Quest requires about 10W in use, and a properly focused blue diode laser with 5W optical output will cut through several millimeters of plywood in one pass.

  • impurekind

    Good, because I simply do not like the idea of an additional puck I have to carry around in my pocket or wherever, be it wireless or wired. Just keep working on making the Quest more powerful and better and smaller and lighter and so on with each generation of headset as best you can, and we'll get to where we need to be in the end without going off on some stopgap tangent.

  • Michael Speth

    I agree a wireless puck is stupid. Are people really calling for a wireless puck? I think what people are asking for is a WIRED puck. A wired puck would include a battery and hardware. The headset would NOT requiring streaming anything.

    Meta has streaming on the brain because they simply do not want you to directly connect to the headset because that defeats their entire premise of their OS. They want to OWN you and your data.

    Nobody is calling for a wireless puck that streams video the headset.

    People are calling for a WIRED puck that provides direct connection to HMD like HTC VIVE PRO VISION Display Port.

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    These questions never have yes/no answers, it always depends on context. They would probably have loved to not need an extra compute puck on Orion, but it just wasn't feasible within a weight and size limit that wouldn't have been immediately ridiculed as nonsense. You absolutely can have PCVR performance in a mobile headset, and we already had this early on with VR backpacks, fully blown PCs with a huge battery worn on the back and connected by wires to the HMD that some companies tried to establish and only location based VR venues used. You can build a standalone Bigscreen Beyond that adds only 50g, but it will be underpowered to the point of being useless with shitty battery life.

    Options change with technology, like sensors getting smaller, wireless faster, so something nonsensical or even impossible now may work in five years, and something possible today may still make no sense in ten. HMD design is always about balance. As in features, and ideally also as in weight on the head. There is a reason for using weaker ARM chips, or tethers, or Fresnel lenses, or external compute packs for some use cases, while others justify 4K microOLED with pancakes, eye tracking with ETFR, hot-swappable batteries, heavy halo straps or using more powerful x86 hardware and GPUs.

    And once you add ergonomics with people having vastly different IPDs, head shapes, eye defects, body sizes, dexterity and mobility, any idea that there is one right way build a VR headset or one thing/tech that has to be included for it to be acceptable becomes just narrow-minded poppycock.

  • Till Eulenspiegel

    That's why Apple has the advantage – they can use the iPhone as the compute unit. People carry their phone everywhere, so it's not another added weight.

  • polysix

    META is a cancer to VR. Standalone crap must die.