Meta reportedly plans another high-end headset “way out in the future”.
Alex Heath reports Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin told staff in an internal presentation the company plans an advanced headset featuring Codec Avatars, the company’s long-running research project to achieve photoreal spatial telepresence via face tracking sensors on VR headsets.
The Codec Avatars project was first revealed in 2019. Last year it’s lead Yaser Sheikh said that when the project started it was “ten miracles away”, and he now believed it was “five miracles away”.
Heath reports Rabkin didn’t say whether this headset will be the immediate successor to the current Quest Pro. The headset received mixed (at best) reviews, with criticism falling on its underwhelming resolution, hefty weight, outdated processor, and lack of automatic room sensing for its headline mixed reality features. In May last year, The Information said it viewed an internal Meta roadmap showing a Quest Pro immediate successor codenamed Funston planned for 2024, but there’s no mention of it in The Verge’s report.
“We want to make it higher resolution for work use and really nail work, text and things like that,” Rabkin reportedly said of the future headset.
In November, a South Korean news outlet reported Meta executives met with Samsung and LG’s display divisions about supplying OLED and MicroLED microdisplays for future VR and AR devices. Microdisplays have significantly higher pixel densities and thus can enable higher resolution in headsets more compact than today’s.
The leaked roadmap also revealed a cheap headset planned for 2024, suggesting this “way out in the future” high-end headset wouldn’t arrive until 2025 at the earliest.
