facebook-xr-headset-prototype-boz-bosworth-zuckerberg-2 — Prototype headsets teased by Meta execs in 2021 | Image courtesy Mark Zuckerberg

Meta Reportedly Targeting Quest 4 Launch in 2026, Vision Pro Competitor in 2027

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Jul 18, 2024

According to a report from The Information, Meta plans to release its next flagship consumer headset, Quest 4, in 2026. Meanwhile, a Vision Pro competitor—likely Quest Pro 2—is reportedly planned for 2027.

According to The Information’s Wayne Ma and Kalley Huang, Meta is planning two consumer-focused headsets for 2026. Codenamed Pismo Low and Pismo High, these are thought to represent Quest 4 and a more affordable Quest 4S (or whatever naming scheme Meta picks for a more affordable variant). That would be two years after the widely rumored launch of a more affordable ‘Quest 3S’ that’s expected to be revealed in September, and three years after the launch of Quest 3.

Beyond those headsets, Meta is also reportedly planning a Vision Pro competitor set for 2027, codenamed La Jolla. While the company’s first “pro” headset, Quest Pro, didn’t find much traction given its price and lack of some key capabilities, Apple’s $3,500 Vision Pro has busted open the price ceiling.

That could make even a $2,000 pro headset from Meta look affordable. At the same time, Apple has paved a clear path for what productivity in an XR headset looks like, which Meta has been rapidly adopting.

In the backdrop however, Meta is reportedly tightening its belt on its XR and metaverse organization, Reality Labs. According to The Information, Meta is trying to cut Reality Labs spending by 20%, following years of costs far outpacing revenue.

Image created by Road to VR, data courtesy Meta

This has coincided with some reshuffling of the inner workings of Reality Labs, including laying off “more than a dozen directors and vice presidents in Reality Labs,” The Information’s report claims.

Meta Reportedly Considering Smaller Mixed Reality "Glasses" for Release in 2027

The report also claims Meta plans to launch its first augmented reality glasses next year, but curiously specifies that it will have a display only “in the right lens” of the glasses, suggesting perhaps an advanced pair of smartglasses (Meta Ray-Ban 3?) more than full AR.

CaryMGVR

One "PISMO: Hi", please!!
[]^ )
Yeshaya

Well congrats to the Quest 3 at least for avoiding the "be made irrelevant by another Meta headset on less than a year" fate suffered by the Rift S and the Quest Pro.
- Christian Schildwaechter
  
  Rift S was an odd product killed by internal politics, with parts of Meta wanting to focus on mobile VR and drop PCVR. Quest Pro wasn't made irrelevant by Quest 3, it just failed to perform its intended role due to lacking software. It wasn't designed as an enthusiast gaming HMD, but as Meta's entry into professional XR, targeting businesses with a focus on virtual conferencing.
  
  That was a fitting use case due to a) business travel causing significant cost, b) becoming a risk with CoViD-19 and c) everybody all of a sudden attending lots of Zoom meetings. Quest Pro with eye and face tracking, easy to put on and off for quick sessions without messing up hair or makeup, and always ready to go thanks to the charging station, was well designed for this use case, and if it had worked, the USD 1500 wouldn't have been an issue.
  
  Quest 3 lacks all the features optimized for business use, so while gamers will obviously pick the cheaper and faster new model with better graphics, Quest Pro would still be the preferred HMD for its target audience if Meta hadn't completely messed up the software and positioning. Had they made clear that gamers wanting an update should wait for Quest 3, they could have prevented much of the backlash, and over time Quest Pro could have grown into the role it was intended for, if Meta eventually provided usable software for it.
  - STEMax
    
    Very interesting comments throughout, however I think that the main reason why the Quest Pro failed was not really the lack of software but the ergonomics of the headset itself. You can afford to wear a heavy and overheated HMD to play a 1h hour session and finish with headache and sweaty, this is not something you want to afford for pro session (especially meetings). I tried it, very uncomfortable and I had bought the device only for that use case (using it as my main screen). I hope the Immersed Visor will do better (if this is not a vaporware :D)
    - Christian Schildwaechter
      
      Ergonomics are very individual, and a solution that fits one person perfectly may be horrible for another. Most HMDs just compromise somewhere. Soft straps as used by Quest 2/3 by default don't provide a lot of stability, but adapt to the shape of the head, and apparently a lot of people are actually fine with them. For me they create unbearable pressure on the check bones if tightened enough to not let the HMD slide down my face.
      
      I found the PSVR1 head strap to be rather comfortable, but all halo straps are pretty much hit or miss due to their lack of adaptability: if they fit you head shape, they will distribute the weight over a large area, making them comfortable. If they don't fit, the stiff construction will put all the weight on a few points of contact with the skull, making them very uncomfortable.
      
      So far there are no perfect solutions: soft straps are cheap and adaptable, but cause a lot of pressure on the face. Bigscreen Beyond creates individualized face paddings based on 3D scan that are very comfortable, but only work for one person, require a very light HMD and are expensive. Apple offers dozens of different padding shapes for hundreds of combinations on AVP, but these need individual fittings, as the matching via 3D scan isn't perfect, and the HMD itself is very expensive. Halo's offer the best stability and comfort, but only if you won the anatomic lottery for a perfect fit. Varjo straps come with a ton of adjustability that allow for excellent balance, but add a lot of weight, complexity and cost.
      
      I really want a fitting halo strap with the HMD freely hanging in front of my face, as pressure on the check bones is a major problem for me, but that may be the worst solution for someone else. Ideally we'll one day get a sort of standard connector for HMDs that allows users to pick whatever head strap and facial interface fits their needs best, getting rid of all the compromises and dependency on average skull shapes.
- ViRGiN
  
  You valve indexians wish you even had such option.
  - ViRGiN
    
    I'm spanking myself silly at this Meta news- why innovate, when you can just make a knock-off Apple clone. All hail Meta!!1!!1@!
    - ViRGiN
      
      Quest Pro 2 is actually a knock off based on highly successful, future-proof valve index.
Derek Kent

Still waiting for a worthy replacement for the Quest 1.
- NL_VR
  
  Quest 3 is huge upgrade from 1
  - CaryMGVR
    
    Dude, it's not worth it, explaining …. lol
    []^ )
  - polysix
    
    with shitty LCD. That's no upgrade.
    - Jeff
      
      Congratulations: you found one thing to complain about while ignoring the mountain of other massive improvements- you totally got em!
      - Christian Schildwaechter
        
        While Quest 3 is a significant upgrade, one thing can make or break a HMD for a person. Some people really hate gray blacks on LCDs, others really despise mura on OLED. I personally was never fazed by LCDs, Fresnel or low FoV, and expect people with pitchforks when I admit that I can see that the pancakes provide a much better clarity and overall image, but barely care.
        
        I was fine with the image on Quest 2, I was fine with the performance, and I pretty much only got a Quest 3 (despite swearing to never again buy an HMD without eye tracking) to experiment with productivity apps and "spatial computing". And the first impression was very negative, as the hard connecting pieces at the back of the default head strap gave me a headache before I had even turned it on for the first time.
        
        My pet peeve with all HMDs is ergonomics, as I am extremely sensitive to pressure on my face or head, making this outweigh all other features. My Quest 2 is a heavily modified Frankenquest, so the unmodified Quest 3 was an immediate downgrade. My plan was always to somehow hack a Quest Pro style halo with flip-up option onto my Quest 3, and I'm not going to generalize my personal experience over the obvious technical advances. But I have some sympathy for the people who will only let go of their OLED Quest 1 once you grab it from their cold, dead hands.
    - NL_VR
      
      Yes it is. Quest 1 is blurry compared
  - Derek Kent
    
    Shitty LCD, nonexistent black levels, yellow tinge, vignette, dull colors, lower IPD range, poor binocular overlap. Quest 3 is a bad headset. Bought it, returned it. it sucks.
    - NL_VR
      
      Im verry happy with it and i had many headsets
impurekind

That seems like an awfully long time for Quest 3 to be their main headset. :-o
- Christian Schildwaechter
  
  Quest 2 released in 2020, Quest 3 in 2023. Quest 4 will release in 2026, so Quest 3 will have been their main (as in features, not in numbers) consumer HMD for three years, just like Quest 2. This is most likely due to Qualcomm currently sticking to a 3 year life cycle on their XR2 SoCs. The XR market is still too small to justify/pay for more frequent updates, despite the updates mostly being a reconfiguration of their current Snapdragon SoC, not even requiring a lot of new development.
  
  We recently heard that Meta has sold at least 1mn Quest 3, based on how many users finished the tutorial, but these are minuscule numbers in the 6bn+ smartphone market that still pays for almost all of the mobile chip development. Maybe Meta would like to iterate faster, but without a sudden unexpected and significant XR growth spurt, each XR2 generation will have to be used in a lot of HMDs by a lot of vendors to make back even just the costs for reconfiguring a phone SoC, before it makes sense to release a successor.
- CaryMGVR
  
  Sarcasm …??
  Two or three years is how it goes, now.
  Things in XR are gogogo!
  []^ )
- kakek
  
  That seems like an awfully short time for a video game device.
  Other console ( and Quests ARE consoles ) have a life cycle more than twice as long.
  The PS5 released just one month after the quest 2. And yet I could buy one right now and expect it to remain "current gen" and play all the game released on sony plateforms longer than a quest 3 will play all game released on meta plateforms.
  
  I get why that is, but it's also definitively a problem.
  - xyzs
    
    Yeah but with your console can push the boundaries of graphics with IE5 games and you can update your tv for an OLED model.
    Here you are stuck with game cube graphics and LCD screens for 2 more years. That feels long.
    - impurekind
      
      Exactly.
      
      Because the tech hasn't quite reached some truly satisfying point yet imo–it needs far more FOV, more resolution as always, higher quality passthrough, much less weight, etc–I think it needs to keep evolving fast to get us to where we need to be as a minimum great experience.
      
      It's passable right now, but not enough or light and comfortable enough that I genuinely feel compelled to play it regularly.
      
      So, yeah, a couple of big jumps are needed across the board before they can slow down and maybe only give us a new headset every handful of years as we get with home consoles right now.
kool

Ar glasses won't be ready until we get some kind of high speed date connection standard from a phone to a glasses style device to off load most of the processing. They will also need at least a 100° fov so let's see when that happens.
- Arno van Wingerde
  
  Why the 100° FoV ? For VR: sure, but for AR a smaller FoV seems acceptable, since outside of that you do not get "blackness" but simply see your environment without AR.
  - kool
    
    Idk, I want it to cover most of my view and not have to hunt for the visuals.
- MC
  
  Isn't it what Xreal and Viture are doing already ?
ShaneMcGrath

Please Meta, More FOV on the Quest 4.
Resolution is fine already but the FOV still sucks on most of these consumer VR headsets, Even if you can only manage an extra 5-10 degrees it would make a huge difference in immersion.
- polysix
  
  needs OLED or it can FO
  - Guest
    
    For a Quest price point that will probably never happen, unless it takes big cuts elsewhere which isn't easy to do for an XR headset. I suspect the "upper mid range" that perhaps slots between the Quest and the Pro would have it. But most people are expecting eye tracking and higher resolution for foveated rendering as standard for Quest 4. That doesn't leave much for a microOLED panel while still hitting the price target.
    - Christian Schildwaechter
      
      microOLED and OLED panels are two very different things. Panels are just like phone screens with rather large pixels, and are still used in Quest 3. MicroOLED are much smaller with very high pixel density and still rather new in XR HMDs (Bigscreen Beyond, AVP) and very expensive.
      
      OLED panels are about 30% more expensive than LCD panels, and the first consumer HMDs used them for the high contrast, but even more because their fast switching times allowed for low persistence, basically flashing the image shortly, then keeping the screen dark for the rest of the frame, which reduces nausea.
      
      Later HMDs switched to LCDs with improved switching speeds, both because of price and the much higher brightness of LCD actually allowing for even shorter persistence. And with pancakes losing about 90% of the light, they simply had to use LCD, as OLED panels aren't bright enough.
      
      MicroOLED work with pancakes, because there a small condensing lens sitting in front of each pixel directs the light towards the pancake lens, compared to OLED display pixels radiating in every direction. So switching Quest 4 to OLED panels wouldn't be financially prohibitive, but technically problematic with pancakes, while switching it to microOLED would work fine with pancakes, but make the HMD much more expensive. What they pick will depend on both the technical and price development of displays over the next few years.
      - Guest
        
        Yes, I should've clarified that I meant microOLED, and you've already explained why it is considered the standard choice for "proper" XR. Brightness is simply not enough for pancake lenses, which is the new standard due to its slimming properties and is no longer an option to backtrack on.
        
        But brightness is still an issue. Even eMagin said they're exploring tandem OLED for their microdisplays for even greater brightness. Given how expensive the displays were for the Vision Pro, I can't imagine how ridiculous it's going to be now.
      - Christian Schildwaechter
        
        I was surprised by the Sony microOLED displays in AVP using dual-layer OLED backlights to increase brightness, contributing to low yield/high cost. I was even more surprised that the latest 13" iPad Pro also uses tandem OLED. The AVP backlight use white OLED with color filters, and I assumed they print two layers of OLEDs onto the substrate, but that doesn't work for very large displays.
        
        So the iPad uses two color OLED panels sandwiched together, achieving insane 1600nits HDR peak brightness and 1000 nits full screen. Just five years ago this required a massive LED backlight on their 32" Pro Display XDR with a CNCed aluminum backside serving as a giant heatsink, back then considered cheap at USD 5000 for a professional HDR reference display.
        
        Sandwiching even increases life span due to lower temperatures for each panel, but seriously drives up cost, not adding 30% compared to LCD panels, but being 2-3 times as expensive as a single layer OLED. eMagin prints color OLED onto substrate in their microOLED displays instead of using white backlights, making it somewhat similar to sandwiching. Not sure how that will impact prices other than it most certainly not being cheap.
- Andrew Jakobs
  
  Yep, I agree, the PPD is ok for now, I'd rather have a larger FOV with the same PPD (ofcourse higher is always better). And OLED like blacks would be also a big plus.
- Master E
  
  I’d be willing to pay a lot more if they increased the FOV. Wish more of these devs could pull off 150-180. I’d almost rather have that than 4k.
Christian Schildwaechter

After the USD 500 Quest 1, Meta went for a budget/enthusiast/professional portfolio. The USD 300/400/300/250/200 Quest 2 (USD 800 with commercial license/device management) served all these roles in a not yet consistent strategy. Meta now settled for Quest 3 for enthusiasts, Quest 2/3S as entry level and Quest Pro as a (failed) business offer. With generational jumps depending on Qualcomm releasing a new XR2 SoC, a 2026 enthusiast Quest 4 and budget 4s, followed by a Pro 2(?) going after AVP matches this partitioning by target group.

MRL shifting is more interesting. Zuckerberg pushed the metaverse as an Oasis like virtual reality future, even renameing Facebook to Meta. But recently XR saw a massive shift towards gradually extending reality with useful virtual features instead of outright replacing it.VR is great for immersion and fun escapism, but few want to stay there all the time, a problem for MRL with its very VR Horizon Worlds and Rooms.

MRL launched lots of random, expensive, sometimes redundant projects, hoping some would stick, resulting in "but why?" things like Meta augments, now back to the drawing board.MRL's lack of focus on user needs was a constant complaint by John Carmack, and it's hard to shift an unfocused operation with too much much money to be forced to prioritize usefulness. Meta now suddenly releasing tons of useful Quest updates is a welcome change, but many of these would have been possible for years before AVP. Reality Labs got the Meta(verse) in their name, but actually needed the vision Apple put into their HMD's name.
- TonyVT SkarredGhost
  
  Great analysis as usual. But I don't agree about augments… they are the thing to do in AR, not a "but why" thing
  - Christian Schildwaechter
    
    I'm fine with augments in AR, and think the equivalent feature on AVP is actually useful. My "but why?" is mostly due to Meta's timing: they introduced augments at a time where MR was barely useful as a background for apps, and nobody in their right mind would have walked around the house wearing a Quest.
    
    For AVP placing features in space makes sense, as you can walk around with real time room scanning , leave a window in another room and then grab it through the wall. But on Quest we are only now getting multi-room tracking support and the option for developers to disable the VR boundary in MR. Augments was a feature that made little sense with the MR restrictions on Quest at the time of its introduction. It looked like one group had started to create spatial widgets as a cool feature and got it working before others had finished the AR parts needed to make it useful. Leading to the question why Meta introduced augments when they were pretty much a pointless gimmick, instead of first getting guardian free multi-room MR to work.
    
    Meta makes great hardware, and I agree with a lot of their ideas and concepts. But the execution, software and their priorities often cause me to wonder WTF they are doing over there at MRL.
    - XRC
      
      Too much dogfooding/insufficient dogfooding….take your pick
      - Christian Schildwaechter
        
        Meta’s VP of Metaverse, Vishal Shah, in 2022:
        
        “For many of us, we don’t spend that much time in Horizon and our dogfooding dashboards show this pretty clearly…Why is that? Why don’t we love the product we’ve built so much that we use it all the time? The simple truth is, if we don’t love it, how can we expect our users to love it?”
        
        So I'm going with "insufficient dogfooding" here.
- Andrey
  
  It's all great and all, but in UploadVR's article (can I mention their site here by the way?) they say that, based on the provided information, there will be a "regular" and "premium" versions of Quest 4 and not "regular" and "cheaper/more affordable" versions. I tried to access the original article to clarify this moment, but it's "pay or you can't read a &^%$" type of site, and I am not willing to spend hundreds of dollars just for this, so…
  
  In any case there were rumors about Quest 2 Plus at the time, a kind of "middle" version between QPro and Quest 2 with eye-tracking and overclocked chip. So I believe – or at least want to believe – that there actually will be a regular Q4 at 400-500$ with pancake lenses, new Qualcomm chip and all other new stuff and Q4 Plus or whatever with even better screens/eyetracking (+facetracking?)/new kind of self-tracking controllers, etc. for additional +XXX$. And later (a year after) they, again, will release Quest 4S if the whole plan of Quest 3S will work out for them.
  - CaryMGVR
    
    You don't hafta pay to read UVR. lol
    You hafta pay to *comment*.
    - Andrey
      
      I was talking about the original article on “The Information” or whatever it called. And they (UVR I mean) changed their policy not so long ago and now everyone can comment if they are just registred.
  - Christian Schildwaechter
    
    These are just labels, and budget/regular/enthusiast could describe the same thing as main/premium/pro. The real distinction is price.
    
    Oculus talked extensively about the instant buy threshold, where a device gets cheap enough for people to just give it a try, as the loss wouldn't hurt them. They put this around USD 300, which is why they worked hard to push Quest 2 below that. Interestingly they found that going down further didn't matter, as against their expectation the USD 249 64GB Go sold better than the USD 199 32GB Go. They observed something similar with later, more expensive Gear VR models.
    
    Above the threshold it becomes an investment that people think about and only make if they expect to use it a lot, resulting in much lower unit sales. Inflation will drive up the threshold, but many Quest now being bought as Christmas presents might also have lowered it.
    
    Meta has to cover that lower end of the market looking mostly at price, as that's where the large user numbers come from, and also the post-threshold middle ground for their most active users looking primarily for value. Ideally they'll also cover the pro market where prices are only limited by expected return of investment. How you call these ranges is arbitrary, and the technology used is determined by what the different prices allows.
  - Christian Schildwaechter
    
    TL;DR: eye tracking integration isn't about hardware cost, but software and performance cost, and there may be strategic reasons concerning software backwards compatibility that stopped Meta from already integrating it into Quest 3 despite negligible hardware prices.
    
    The reasons for/against eye tracking on mobile HMDs are complicated, and it's not about the cost of the sensors. Most implementations use two lowres nIR 400×400 pixel cameras, similar/the same as those for room/hand tracking, and very cheap. The Lumi approach of determining gaze direction by measuring the "whiteness" level changed by iris position with very simple photo sensors is even cheaper, but I can get a tiny ESP32 SoCs with matching camera for EUR 7 incl. shipping on AliExpress, and two of these with the free EyeTrackVR firmware and a 3D printed adapter will add eye tracking to Quest 2/3 or pretty much anything.
    
    So price was never the issue. These simple solutions give you gaze tracking for UIs like on AVP, but not necessarily performance gains from ETFR, for which you also need compute expensive software for eye movement prediction that is hard to write, possibly covered by lots of patents, and very taxing for current mobile SoCs. ET on Quest Pro was therefore sold for correct gaze in VR conferencing, while the ETFR implementation is barely worth using and drains the battery. The problem is that you need to rather precisely predict where the eye will look during the next frame, which might be a issue with the by default less accurate Lumi approach that will also be more sensitive to environmental light than cameras.
    
    Whenever you talk about eye tracking costs, you have to differentiate between hardware cost (low) and performance cost (low for only pupil tracking for UI, high for ETFR). Which is why ET on HMDs depends so much on use case. I'd expect ET cameras for UI interaction on Quest 4 and all future HMDs due to negligible cost. The main reason Meta didn't include them on Quest 3 was partly the limited use case (before AVP), and I suspect them treating Quest 2 and 3 as mostly compatible HMDs running pretty much the same games at different graphics levels. Meta seriously underclocks the CPU part of the XR2 Gen 2, giving Quest 3 2.5x the graphics, but only 1.17x the compute in games. The SD8 Gen 2 is way more balanced.
    
    So I speculate that Quest 2 and 3 are conceptually one generation like PS4 and PS4 Pro, with the mid-generation model introducing only non-essential features. On Quest 3 this was MR. If they manage to get ETFR properly running on Quest 4, this could allow for a very significant performance boost and/or higher resolution/FoV similar to what Sony gained on PSVR2, which would make it very hard to release titles that work similarly well on both Quest 4 with and Quest 3 without ETFR. So maybe ET was cut from Quest 3 mostly because this is a backwards compatibility breaking feature that will only be allowed with a major generational jump with significant hardware and UI changes. Which btw means the upcoming Quest 3S is mostly about adding MR/color passthrough, not performance parity to Quest 3, and depending on price may only be slightly faster than Quest 2, making it similar to a PS4 Slim.
  - Dave
    
    They may have used "regular" and "premium" but we all know what that means. It means "cheaper" and "regular" versions.
    
    If you are going to argue this, then the standard 'Quest 3' as it is now will appear to become the cheaper Quest 4 and the Premium version will be a more enhanced version. Sorry that will absolutely not happen, it makes no concievable sense.
- Dave
  
  The word 'Meta' means 'beyond' or 'after' – that name change is a perfect fit for its technology portfolio and espirations.
  - Christian Schildwaechter
    
    That's why Neil Stephenson coined the "metaverse" from Greek "μετά/meta" for beyond and "universe" in Snow Crash for a virtual world beyond ours. Which is why Facebook became Meta. No doubt their branding experts and lawyers made sure the new name was short, memorable, not horribly offensive, with a generic, positive meaning applicable to anything in case the whole metaverse business went up in flames.
    
    Facebook is planning to change its company name next week to reflect its focus on building the metaverse, according to a source with direct knowledge of the matter. – The Verge 2021-10
    
    Besides referencing virtual worlds from a 1992 SciFi classic, the word Meta isn't any better for communicating their technology portfolio and aspirations than Next, Beyond or Tomorrowland. And naming any company after a generic word in use for thousands of years will cause issues with brand protection, brand awareness and search engine optimization.
    
    Given that Meta now emphasizes AI everywhere to appease stock holders, rarely talked about VR to the general public after the short metaverse hype, and like everyone else in XR is now going after useful extensions to real life instead of fully virtual worlds, the new name might end up a not so perfect fit.
- Jonathan Winters III
  
  MRL?
  - Christian Schildwaechter
    
    Meta Reality Labs, their XR division, if that was the question.
Somerandomindividual

If the Quest Pro 2 will not arrive until 2027 then oh boy… Meta are going to lose a ton of actual and potential market share. Samsung/Google are releasing their new XR products well before then, and companies like ASUS will license Horizon OS to produce their own devices. Meta will really need to bring something special to the table to claw back those users.
- Christian Schildwaechter
  
  Apple sold 125mn iPhones in 2022. They will sell less than 500K AVP in 2024 due to display supply constraints, and not a lot more during the next few years due to the high price. Samsung sold 200mn smartphones in 2022. It's not particularly likely they'll sell even 1mn XR HMDs at USD 2000 in 2025.
  
  Meta probably sold around 2mn Quest 3 for USD 500 since it launched in October 2023, and still sold way more Quest 2 to budget sensitive users. Varjo, HTC and Pimax have been selling to the USD 1000+ professional/high end VR segment in only very moderate numbers for years. It's not like there is a huge market for USD 1000+ HMDs just waiting for someone to finally tap into it.
  
  So it's not very likely that there will be many high end XR users for Meta to claw back in 2027. And regarding business users Meta's main problem is not being late, but their inconsistent strategy for professional VR, having abandoned multiple Go/Quest for business programs and their Quest Pro HMDs. Companies still go for HTC despite worse specs at higher prices simply because they provide reliable support and flexible license agreements that are way more important for expensive projects that running the latest tech.
- Andrew Jakobs
  
  But if others are gonna use Horizon OS, that's only a win gor Meta as they do make most of the money through their store, not on the hardware, that is sold at cost.
Rupert Jung

If they needed some money, they could easily port their PCVR titles to PSVR2. People are crying for software there and Sony doesn't care.
- kakek
  
  Let's be fair, PSVR 2 is such a small market that it would barely be profitable.
xyzs

With VR you better be patient, or immoral.
LCD screens till 2026 (at least because they could continue…), damnnnnn.
I will buy a contender, this company is too slow to deliver a true Quest 1 successor.
- Jonathan Winters III
  
  LCD is being used to meet their mass-market pricepoint. It is indeed a necessary evil. Hopefully not for much longer.
MosBen

As a fan of XR tech I'm glad that Meta continues to put money into developing it further, but I'm simply uninterested in buying into a new way for Meta to harvest my personal data.
Andrew Jakobs

That's a shame, I'll bet many people hoped a successor of the Q3 at least by the end of 2025, not 2026.
- Christian Schildwaechter
  
  Not sure if faster generation cycles will ever happen, simply due to physics. Mobile SoCs gain ~30% performance every year, meaning they about double the performance every three years. One of the main reasons for long console cycles is that targeting one well defined hardware configuration makes game development a lot easier and cheaper, and over time devs learn how to get the most of the current generation. So releasing a new Playstation each year for a 30% gain would actually make things worse, and not even doubling the performance is worth the added friction, leading to 6-7 year long cycles, partly due to desktop CPU/GPU performance rising a little slower then on mobile.
  
  People also won't upgrade for a small performance bump, so more frequent updates increase cost, but not necessarily unit sales. On phones we got used to rather fast two year upgrade cycles, but these mostly depend on people getting a new "free" phone every time they renew their 24 months contract. Without fixed contracts, phone users upgrade less often. "2x the performance" after three years provides a nice round number/updgrade motivation, possibly one of the reasons why Qualcomm went with a three year XR2 cycle. Better for developers by providing a single performance target, and long enough that many users will upgrade with each iteration, again making things easier for devs.
  - Andrew Jakobs
    
    I agree, but with a 60% performance increase over 2 years that is pretty hefty. Smartphones doubled every year in the beginning.
    But we'll see what competitors like Pico will do now the Gen2 exclusivity is about to end. The Pico 4 is already an improvement over the Quest 2 (technically speaking, gamewise it is still lagging behind, and I don't see Pico gonna use Horizon OS).
    - Christian Schildwaechter
      
      With the low hanging fruits picked and many architectural tricks like long pipelines or branch prediction coming with power/security issues, performance increases keep falling. Add everyone now focusing on power efficiency, and there are less performance reasons for more frequent upgrades.
      
      We might still get those if XR HMDs become even a fraction as ubiquitous as smartphones. Not only due to the increased market/financial feasibility, but also because the "stable development target" mostly applies to game consoles. More generic PCs and phones come in a range of configurations, as maxing performance for productivity use with the latest or more expensive tech by far outweight benefits for game developers or fair play that unified hardware may offer.
      
      Looking at the optimization state of PC vs console games, I'm not sure more rapid releases would result in actual performance gains for gamers though. But combined with the current monopolies being forced to open up their app stores, the added drive from more competition alone might be worth it.
Eddy

Good things take time, I can wait
SpatialBiggs

What saddens me the most is how far away eye and face tracking seems to be. We need full body inside out tracking to get to the real meat of what XR is as a medium. Together, in shared spaces and fully embodied.
Derek Kent

It would be awesome if they released a new headset that's better than Quest 1. They haven't done it yet.
Icebeat

2026 is going to be a bit too later
Jackson

Damn… i really hope this changes. Meta's CODEC avatars are the biggest leverage they have. They need to get a pro line out way sooner than 2027 if they want to flex in that space.