- Meta teased “future headphones” in its recent investor call
- Zuckerberg also suggested that Meta wants to use AI to let you access videos.
- No definitive plans or timelines were provided.
Due to the recent layoffs, many were wondering if this was the beginning of the end for Meta’s VR plans, but the company has reaffirmed that it is still working on new technology in the space, including new hardware and a possible AI integration that is truly science fiction.
Speaking to investors following its latest quarterly earnings report, CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t talk much about virtual reality, perhaps unsurprisingly, instead focusing on smart glasses whose sales have “more than tripled” in the last year.
Initially it’s not a great sign for the future of virtual reality. However, Meta CFO Suan Li changed our hopes when responding to a question from Deutsche Bank’s Benjamin Black about Reality Labs.
She said: “We remain optimistic about the future of virtual reality,” adding: “We are continually investing; rather, we are moving forward in building future headsets.” She said this before putting a slight damper on our VR hopes by explaining what we already knew, that “consumer adoption of VR has generally been on a slower growth path than wearable devices, and we are rebalancing our Reality Labs portfolio to reflect this.”
No further details were revealed about these “future headphones”, but leaks have pointed to two possible devices that will arrive in 2026 and/or 2027.
One would be a ‘Quest 4’ which is a big but more typical upgrade from its predecessor, and will again come with a top-end model and a slightly lower model as we saw with the Quest 3 and Quest 3S.
Then there are the headphones I’ve dubbed the Quest Pro 2. They’re expected to be ultralight (with a design more like glasses or goggles than headphones) thanks to the battery and computing power being transferred to a puck that you carry in your pocket. It would also be more focused on productivity rather than putting emphasis on gaming.
An AI upgrade
The other major 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 truly sci-fi future use case during the presentation: “There’s definitely a version of the future where you can tap any video you see and jump to it.”
Now, the way Zuckerberg describes this future, it’s certainly not something we’ll see next week or maybe even in the next few years, but this would be a further improvement on the AI-based tools we’re already seeing. which can convert 2D scenes into stereoscopic 3D.
Beyond virtual reality, Zuckerberg’s words also suggest that it could be a tool that we see coming to mobile platforms, which is now also the main focus of its Horizon metaverse. Being able to generate worlds from images (from our digital memory) would be a powerful creative tool for these types of immersive social experiences across platforms, and could be the differentiating factor Meta needs as its AI models lag behind rivals like ChatGPT, Gemini and others.
These vague hardware references and AI promises don’t give us a firm timeline for when Meta’s next VR developments will drop, but they do at least indicate a next step that feels less miserable for us VR fans.
However, the question remains whether Meta can regain any favor, or whether upcoming devices like the Steam Frame will eat Meta’s lunch, as I suspect they might.
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