Meta’s social VR platform just took its first step outside of Quest-exclusivity, as the company recently launched a closed beta for Horizon Worlds on Android mobile devices.
You won’t find Horizon Worlds on Google Play. Users taking part in the closed beta can directly launch the app through the Quest Android app.
X (previously Twitter) user Lunayian was apparently one of those chosen few, showing off a brief hands-on in the Super Rumble lobby, Meta’s first-party hero shooter revealed late last month.
Besides scripted avatar animations, the user’s legs seem to be what visually separates users on Quest from Android mobile devices, as Quest users are doomed to skate around as floating torsos until Meta decides otherwise.
There’s no word when the company plans to roll out access on browsers either, which the beta’s FAQ says will broaden availability of the platform to iOS devices on Safari, and Google Chrome, Safari, or Microsoft Edge on laptops and desktops.
At the time of this writing, the standard geolocation restrictions are still in effect for Horizon Worlds, with only users in the following countries able to access the platform: Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
When it does roll out to more locations and platforms though, it will be better positioned to actually compete with the most successful metaverse apps, such as Rec Room, Roblox, and VR Chat, all of which have benefited from releasing on essentially every major platform worldwide—VR headsets and traditional platforms included. Undoubtedly, Meta is looking to replicate this success with Horizon Worlds, as it is now offering up better (and decidedly more sticky) first-party content like Super Rumble.
We’re sure to learn more about new Horizon Worlds features at the company’s annual Connect developer conference soon, which takes place September 27th, steaming both online and in-person for a select few at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters.
A new charging dock from Meta, apparently for Quest 3, has been revealed through regulatory certification. As with Quest Pro’s dock, the goal of the new dock is certainty to streamline headset usage by encouraging users to keep it charged and always up-to-date.
Friction in VR—all of the clunk associated with putting a thing on your head, fitting it, then, going through menus to get to the software you want to use—is a tough challenge the industry has been slowly chipping away at over many years.
One major piece of that friction comes with keeping headsets charged and up-to-date. It’s an all-too-common occurrence for someone to forget to plug in their headset after a session and then realize the battery is dead the next time they have the urge to use it. Worse still, if it’s been a while since they plugged the headset in, it’s likely to need updates to both the core software and specific apps before it’s ready to go.
This is a clear issue, and one that Meta has attempted to address with an official charging dock, first sold alongside the Quest Pro headset. The dock charges both the headset and controllers, making sure everything is juiced and keeping the headset powered on and updated (well, when the auto updates actually work).
The FCC is tasked with certifying products with electromagnetic emissions to be safe and compatible with regulations. Products utilizing radio, WiFi, infrared, etc. need certification before they can be distributed for sale. Certification by the FCC marks one step closer to the launch of consumer electronics product.
The documentation reveals that the dock includes “wireless charging function for left and right controllers,” apparently up to 2.5 watts. That’s pretty slow compared to what we see from wireless charging on modern smartphones, but may be more than adequate for the Quest 3 controllers which don’t need as much power as a smartphone or the headset itself. The actual Quest 3 headset will continue to charge via direct contact as we can see by the pins revealed on the underside of the headset.
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Wireless charging is an interesting change from the Quest Pro dock which exclusively relies on direct-contact charging. One reason for this change is likely that the current method of docking the Quest Pro controllers is quite awkward—sometimes leading to the controllers not charging when it looks like they should be. The headset itself is much easier to place in the proper location.
The Quest Pro controllers must be angled somewhat awkwardly to make proper correct contact with the dock for charging | Photo by Road to VR
A Quest 3 dock with wireless controller charging could create more tolerance for mispositioned controllers, leaving less room for user-error.
One big question is whether or not the dock will be included with Quest 3.
Considering Meta’s goal to keep the sticker price of the mainline Quest headsets low, we’d guess it will be made available as an optional accessory. But there’s a chance that Meta deems the dock important enough to the overall user experience that they opt to include it right in the box.
If it did come in the box, this would be the first time the company included rechargeable controllers in its consumer line of VR headsets. All prior consumer headset controllers from Meta have required AA batteries, though it’s always been easy enough to add recharging to the controllers through inexpensive rechargeable AA batteries.
The Quest 3 dock will unfortunately almost certainly not be compatible with Quest 2 controllers because the newer headset is using a new controller which the company calls Touch Plus.
Image courtesy Meta
The new controller does away with the tracking ring that has always been present on the company’s consumer VR controllers, and will likely include the hardware necessary for wireless charging.
Oculus Connect. Facebook Connect. Meta Connect. Whatever the company is calling its annual XR developer conference, it’s been nearly a decade since the first Connect was held—all of them either in-person or exclusively livestreamed. Pandemic notwithstanding, they all had one important thing in common: none of the conferences used the company’s core XR technology to virtually connect people. Why is that?
Started by Oculus in 2014, Connect was where the earliest of early adopters could meet and learn how to make their games and apps happen for the first consumer VR headsets. Engineers, designers, and creatives from around the world made pilgrimage to the California-based event, becoming one of the premier venues for the VR developer community to rub elbows, pitch projects, and grok new hardware. Although the ‘startup magic’ wore off with the event’s gradual hand over from original Oculus founders to the Meta Mothership, the in-person event still manages to maintain legendary status among VR devs as being a great place for networking and learning.
Starting in 2020, Connect was exclusively livestreamed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There would be no elbow-rubbing. No free candy. No after-session drinks for three long years. Granted, an “in-person presence” is coming back this year for the first time since 2019, however the event is only allowing a “limited” number of attendees to enter the halls of Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters, a stark contrast to when it was held as a full-blown conference at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Let’s just forget the first six years of the conference. For the last three years, Meta only offered a remote experience—standard pre-recorded livestream videos for developers who wanted to attend ‘in-person’, all of whom definitely had VR headsets at the ready. I’m not talking about last year’s Meta Connect room in Horizon Worlds either, which hosted all of the main talks in a collection of theaters so you could watch in VR with a bunch of randos. I’m talking about taking a metaverse convention center to where you might think it logically belongs.
While only Zuckerberg et al know precisely why Meta hasn’t pursued a true VR version of Connect, we can speculate.
Limited Horizons
Let’s pretend for a moment that Meta wants to bring its dev conferences to the metaverse moving forward. If it relies solely on pre-recorded flatscreen videos like it does now, people probably won’t show up because they can always watch later—and more conveniently not in a headset—which means there’s no real conference as such. If it had a live component though with round table discussions and talks with Q&A sessions for attendees—closer to a live conference—then maybe people would want to stay up late in the Eastern Hemisphere to see what’s up. Maybe.
Introduced in 2020 as Facebook Worlds, the budding social VR platform has moved slowly to flush out the basic features already available in other, more successful apps like Rec Room, VRChat, and Roblox—all available on a plethora of devices besides the Quest platform. Meanwhile, Horizon Worlds is only available to Quest users in a handful of countries, including the US, UK, Canada, France, Iceland, Ireland, and Spain. Statistically, most people on planet Earth don’t live in those countries.
Image courtesy Meta
Only now is the company’s social platform starting to catch up somewhat by offering up stickier first-party content; like its latest hero shooter Super Rumble, which Meta is ostensibly using as a nucleation point for bigger and better things. Its first-party metaverse could one day become the default choice for users at some point, but the company’s Reality Labs team will need to beat those social apps mentioned above, which have both an earlier lead and wider distribution.
Still, the COVID-19 years could have been a boon to accelerating Horizon Worlds by bringing third-party devs deeper into the fold with a conference as the impetus, although that might have been too large of a risk to bear. While keynote-watching parties are fairly straightforward in social VR (like we saw in the Connect room in Horizon Worlds last year) actually making a VR version of the event at a level Meta can then project to the rest of the world is a pretty daunting task—both technically and conceptually—even for a company with the resources of Meta.
The fact is though the company’s social VR offerings have historically been undercooked, with its Quest-exclusive platform Horizon Worlds still doughy and baking in the oven to this day. There’s no doubt Horizon Worlds could be better, but even if it were, virtualizing such a conference in any meaningful way could present a bigger risk than Meta may be willing to take.
A fully virtualized conference with live participation could be rife with other issues, some of which have no real solution. As with all social VR apps, a speaker’s Internet connection can drop out, audio latency can stymie the flow of conversation, and a single bad actor can completely derail an important moment—all of the sort of unprofessional things that are acceptable on a Friday night in VRChat, but not on the world stage that regularly attracts scrutiny from the wider public.
The former CTO John Carmack was a big proponent of the event, but revealed that some of the reason it didn’t go fully virtual was about how avatars looked:
Now, doing [Connect] in Horizon for real in an ideal world would mean having this sort of arena-scale support with thousands of avatars milling around, at least hundreds in large rooms, and in a completely uniformly shared world. That’s a serious technical challenge and Horizon definitely can’t handle it now, but it’s not an insurmountable one. However, there’s a really huge tension with avatar rendering quality. There was some public mockery about avatar quality earlier this year, and now lots of people internally are paranoid about showing anything but the highest possible quality avatars. And more rendering features are being pushed to increase the quality instead of the quantity.
Functionally, some extra bits might fall to the wayside too, like impromptu hallway chat sessions, sidebars while waiting in line for drinks, and off-site parties—you know, the serendipitous networking stuff that make conferences more worth the time and effort to attend. How can this be recreated in VR? Make people wander virtual hallways to get from one session to another? Not only would that seem like a silly skeuomorphism, but simulating the avatars and voices of hundreds of people in one virtual space—all on the mobile phone hardware that’s inside a Quest 2 headset—is far from trivial.
There probably are solutions to these problems, but they aren’t as obvious as they might seem at first.
Also, let’s not even talk about time zones. Or the lack of free drinks and candy. I think I mentioned that several times actually. While undoubtedly challenging, some things can’t be virtually replicated at all though: new hardware.
You Can’t Try New Hardware Virtually
Connect is one of the events where Meta typically shows off new hardware and gives devs some of their first hands-on previews, which play an important role in how they choose to invest their time and resources. And as the company moves into increasingly complex areas of development, like varifocal optics, retinal resolution, and lightfield passthrough, seeing it is often the next step to believing it.
But what about Quest 2? Released in late 2020, that was the definition of a ‘pandemic headset’, right? It seems like a foregone conclusion that devs would choose to build apps for Quest 2 simply based on the fact that it’s the industry’s most successful consumer VR headset to date, but it’s really not so simple. Quest 2’s success is directly linked to the groundwork the company laid by the original 2019 Quest, Meta’s first (and arguably the first truly viable) 6DOF standalone headset. And Quest 1 did benefit from an extensive hands-on lead up back when the company was still calling it ‘Santa Cruz’.
Quest [left] and Quest 2 [right] | Photo by Road to VR
Could the company have released a hypothetical first-gen Quest during a pandemic? Maybe, but it probably would have been more difficult showing what sort of apps and experiences the device can technically handle. Both Quest and Quest 2’s mobile chipset are significantly underpowered in comparison to the min spec target for PC VR projects, forcing devs to heavily optimize, or in some cases entirely rebuild their apps from the ground-up. In short, Quest walked so Quest 2 could run.
Maybe Don’t Hold Your Breath
In the end, Meta has consistently decided to not push its core technology as a way for developers to connect, and not trying to solve those problems during a time when the world needed it the most feels like a missed opportunity.
This year’s Connect in September should give us a better idea of whether we’ll ever get back to those heady in-person Connects of years past, or if their plans to further flesh out Horizon Worlds could include putting on larger virtual events. Still, it’s not likely we’ll see Meta hold Connect exclusively—or even partially to any meaningly virtual effect—until more of those social VR pain points can be smoothed over.
Maybe the next generation of mixed reality headsets can cure some of those ills, as in-person attendees can participate alongside their virtual counterparts somehow? Maybe Meta just doesn’t believe enough in Horizon Worlds to make it work? Maybe most devs don’t really need Connect anymore, and virtualizing it won’t serve a meaningful purpose? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Meta unveiled two new VR headset prototypes that showcase more progress in the fight to solve some persistent technical challenges facing VR today. Presenting at SIGGRAPH 2023, Meta is demonstrating a headset with retinal resolution combined with varifocal optics, and another headset with advanced light field passthrough capabilities.
Butterscotch Varifocal Prototype
Revealed in a developer blogpost, Meta showed off a varifocal research prototype that demonstrates a VR display system which provides “visual clarity that can closely match the capabilities of the human eye,” says Meta Optical Scientist Yang Zhao. The so-called ‘Butterscotch Varifocal’ prototype provides retinal resolution of up to 56 pixels per degree (PPD), which is sufficient for 20/20 visual acuity, researchers say.
Since its displays are also varifocal, it can support from 0 to 4 diopter (i.e. infinity to 25 cm), and matching what researchers say are “the dynamics of eye accommodation with at least 10 diopter/s peak velocity and 100 diopter/s2 acceleration.” The pulsing motors below control the displays’ focal distance in an effort to match the human eye.
Varifocal headsets represent a solution to the vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC) which has plagued standard VR headsets, the most advanced consumer headsets included. Varifocal headsets not only include the same standard support for the vergence reflex (when eyes converge on objects to form a stereo image), but also the accommodation reflex (when the lens of the eye changes shape to focus light at different depths). Without support for accommodation, VR displays can cause eye strain, make it difficult to focus on close imagery, and may even limit visual immersion.
Check out the through-the-lens video below to see how Butterscotch’s varifocal bit works:
Using LCD panels readily available on the market, Butterscotch manages its 20/20 retinal display by reducing the field of view (FOV) to 50 degrees, smaller than Quest 2’s ~89 degree FOV.
Although Butterscotch’s varifocal abilities are similar to the company’s prior Half Dome prototypes, the company says Butterscotch is “solely focused on showcasing the experience of retinal resolution in VR—but not necessarily with hardware technologies that are ultimately appropriate for the consumer.”
“In contrast, our work on Half Dome 1 through 3 focused on miniaturizing varifocal in a fully practical manner, albeit with lower-resolution optics and displays more similar to today’s consumer headsets,” explains Display Systems Research Director Douglas Lanman. “Our work on Half Dome prototypes continues, but we’re pausing to exhibit Butterscotch Varifocal to show why we remain so committed to varifocal and delivering better visual acuity and comfort in VR headsets. We want our community to experience varifocal for themselves and join in pushing this technology forward.”
Flamera Lightfield Passthrough Prototype
Another important side of making XR more immersive is undoubtably the headset’s passthrough capabilities, like you might see on Quest Pro or the upcoming Apple Vision Pro. The decidedly bug-eyed design of Meta’s Flamera research prototype is looking for a better way to create more realistic passthrough by using light fields.
Research Scientist Grace Kuo wearing the Flamera research prototype | Image courtesy Meta
In standard headsets, cameras are typically placed a few inches from where your eyes actually sit, capturing a different view than what you’d see if you weren’t wearing a headset. While there’s a lot of distortion and placement correction going on in standard headsets of today, you’ll probably still notice a ton of visual artifacts as the software tries to correctly resolve and render different depths of field.
“To address this challenge, we brainstormed optical architectures that could directly capture the same rays of light that you’d see with your bare eyes,” says Meta Research Scientist Grace Kuo. “By starting our headset design from scratch instead of modifying an existing design, we ended up with a camera that looks quite unique but can enable better passthrough image quality and lower latency.”
Check out the quick explainer below to see how Flamera’s ingenious capture methods work:
Now, here’s a comparison between an unobstructed view and Flamera’s light field capture, showing off some pretty compelling results:
As research prototypes, there’s no indication when we can expect these technologies to come to consumer headsets. Still, it’s clear that Meta is adamant about showing off just how far ahead it is in tackling some of the persistent issues in headsets today—something you probably won’t see from the patently black box that is Apple.
You can read more about Butterscotch and Flamera in their respective research papers, which are being presented at SIGGRAPH 2023, taking place August 6th – 10th in Los Angeles. Click here for the Butterscotch Varifocal abstract and Flamera full paper.
Meta’s latest quarterly results show its Reality Labs XR division is again reporting an operating loss just south of $4 billion. Now, for its Q2 2023 results, the company says Reality Labs’ revenue was down by 39% due to lower Quest 2 sales, making for the worst quarterly performance in the past two years.
Meta has been clear about its plan to spend aggressively on XR over the next several years, so it’s again no surprise we’re seeing operating budgets in the billions with only a fraction of that coming back in via Quest 2 hardware and software sales.
In fact, Quest 2 sales play such an important role in Reality Labs’ quarterly performance that Meta has reported $276 million in revenue in Q2 2023, or 39% lower than last quarter.
Image created using data courtesy Meta
Meta reported that Reality Labs expenses were $4 billion, which was up 23% since the same period last year. The company says this was due to lapping a reduction in Reality Labs loss reserves and growth in employee-related costs, bringing the XR division’s operating loss to $3.7 billion for Q2 2023.
Meta says it expects continued operating losses in the future, saying losses will likely “increase meaningfully year-over-year due to our ongoing product development efforts in AR/VR and our investments to further scale our ecosystem.”
Meanwhile, the company is preparing to launch Quest 3 in late 2023, the $500 follow-up headset that integrates many of Quest Pro’s mixed reality capabilities. Meta’s $1,000 Quest Pro has also reportedly been discontinued, however (without substantiating that particular claim) Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth implied earlier this month that a Quest Pro 2 isn’t off the table.
Apple’s Vision Pro is also looming, set to launch sometime next year. As rising tides lift all boats, hype around Vision Pro could actually benefit Meta in the short term. Apple’s $3,500 XR headset has attracted new attention to the space, however Meta’s consumer-friendly pricing and extensive game catalogue for Quest 3 may be well positioned this holiday to capitalize on that Apple-adjacent cachet.
Meta announced it’s introducing new anti-piracy measures for Quest developers that the company says will protect VR apps from “unauthorized modifications and potential security breaches.”
Called the Platform Integrity Attestation API (Attestation API), Meta says its new system is designed to detect whether an app’s server is interacting with an untampered VR device, thereby ensuring whether an app is authentic or not.
The Attestation API includes things like secure device authentication, hardware-based app bans, protection of financial and enterprise app data, prevention of external data misuse, and other anti-piracy measures.
In a developer blogpost, Meta calls it “increasingly important to instill a consistent method for validating the integrity of apps in order to provide a secure and safe user experience for everyone.”
It remains to be seen what effects this will have on modding communities, since modders for Quest games such as Beat Saber may inadvertently run afoul of the new token system at the core of the Attestation API.
“Once integrated, the API will provide you with an ‘attestation token,’ which you can use to determine if an app running on a Meta device has been tampered with,” Meta says. “This token is cryptographically signed by the Attestation Server to reinforce the security and reliability of the attestation process.”
At the time of this writing, we have not yet received a response for comment from Meta on what effects it may have on those communities. We’ll update this piece when/if we do.
Meta is allowing developers to opt-in now for their Quest apps, which spans Quest 2, Quest Pro, and the upcoming Quest 3, which is slated to launch in late 2023. Meta has published documentation for both Unity and Native.
According to a recent report from The Information, Meta is allegedly spinning down Quest Pro alongside a broader move to cancel the future ‘Pro’ line of XR hardware altogether. Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth says however, “don’t believe everything you read.”
Meta has reportedly stopped ordering new components for the Quest Pro from its suppliers, The Information maintains. While it’s thought Meta will continue selling its $1,000 Pro-branded mixed reality headset as long as there is enough stock, the report alleges the entire Pro line has been suspended, putting a second-generation Quest Pro distinctly out of the question.
Speaking in an Instagram Stories post yesterday, Bosworth rebukes the claim that a potential Quest Pro 2 has officially been cancelled for good, saying that his team is developing multiple prototypes in parallel for all of its projects. Notably, he doesn’t address whether it’s spinning down the current version of Quest Pro, however he implies that the report of Quest Pro 2’s demise was the result of a disgruntled employee whose project was cut.
Here’s Bosworth’s statement in full:
“I have to explain this every year. There is no Quest Pro 2 headset until we decide there is. What I mean by that is there are lots of prototype headsets—lots of them—all in development in parallel. Some of them, we say, “that’s not the right one,” and we shut it down. Some of them, we say, “that’s the right one,” and we spin it up. What you need to understand is, until it goes out the door, it doesn’t get the name. So, there might be a Quest Pro 2, there might not be. I’m not really telling you, but I will say don’t believe everything you read about what’s been stopped or started. A lot of times it comes from someone who’s unhappy their particular project got cut when there are other projects that did not get cut.”
Still, it’s clear there’s been some turbulence in how Quest Pro was handled from the get-go. Originally launched for $1,500 in October 2022, Meta decided only a few months later it would slash Quest Pro by $500, putting at its $1,000 price tag today. Meanwhile, Quest 2 has seen multiple price changes, ranging from $300 to $400 for the same 128GB variant.
Fluctuating prices aside, Quest Pro’s raison d’être has never really been clearly defined, as the company has nebulously pitched it to professionals as a would-be workstation. In practice, Quest Pro has been more of a developer kit for studios hoping to build consumer apps for the cheaper Quest 3, coming in Fall 2023 at $500. Meanwhile, Quest Pro users have reported a host of usability issues since launch, decidedly making it feel a little less ready for prime time than the company probably hoped.
Whatever the case, Quest Pro 2 would need a much clearer value proposition—provided whatever prototypes Meta has waiting in the wings also don’t also get cut.
One of the biggest names social gaming is coming to Quest. Roblox is home to tens of millions of daily users and user-generated experiences. “In the coming weeks” Roblox will launch on Quest, casting a shadow on Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds.
A Curious Proposition
Meta confirmed today that Roblox is coming to Quest “in the coming weeks” starting as an Open Beta on App Lab before eventually graduating to a full launch on the main Quest store.
On one hand, the move is a win for Meta. Roblox is one of the most popular social gaming and user-generated content platforms; playing in a similar ballpark with the likes of Minecraft and Fortnite. Getting Roblox onto Quest brings a valuable and recognizable IP to the platform, along with a huge new social graph of non-VR players.
On the other hand, Roblox is very nearly a direct competitor to Meta’s own social VR platform, Horizon Worlds. Both Horizon and Roblox are heavily focused on social experiences and user-generated content. But compared to Horizon, which caters only to the smaller demographic of VR players, Roblox has some 66 million daily active players across Xbox, iOS, Android, desktop—and soon, Quest.
For comparison, that means the number of people playing Roblox every day (66 million) is more than the total number of Quest headsets ever sold (believed to be around 20 million).
So ambitious creators looking to build content for the largest audience (and largest return-on-investment) will see the scale tipped vastly toward Roblox over Horizon.
Whether or not Roblox on Quest will stifle the fledgling Horizon remains to be seen, but needless to say this is an awkward situation. Not just for Meta though; Roblox also represents a looming threat to other social VR applications like VRChat and Rec Room.
Roblox Content Compatibility on Quest
Roblox currently has some 15 million playable experiences for users to choose from, but not all (probably not most) will be suitable to play on Quest.
Meta says the Roblox Open Beta on Quest is a “great opportunity for the Roblox developer community to optimize their existing games for Quest and build new ones for VR while gathering input and feedback from the Quest community.”
That said, Roblox Corp plans to automatically enable VR support for some portion of existing Roblox experiences, though exactly how many is unclear.
“[…] we have automatically updated the Access setting for some of the experiences that use default player scripts to include support for VR devices. We have found that experiences that use default player scripts typically run well in VR without modifications. Automatically publishing these experiences allows us to seed our library of experiences that support VR devices,” the company says in its announcement of Roblox on Quest.
Presently it isn’t clear if or how the company plans to ensure that user-generated Roblox experiences on meet minimum performance expectations on Quest.
Modernized PC VR Support for Roblox
Roblox has offered PC VR support for many years at this point and the company appears committed to continue supporting the platform in addition to Quest.
Less than a month ago Roblox Corp announced that it would adopt OpenXR to future-proof its VR support, including for PC VR headsets. The update also included improvements to correctly synchronizing the player’s VR playspace and scale to that of the current experience.
Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth said this week that the announcement of Quest 3, which came just days ahead of Vision Pro reveal, had nothing to do with the timing of Apple’s first public foray into XR.
“People won’t believe me, I don’t care—I’m telling the truth, you can believe me or not, that’s up to you […],” Bosworth began in a Q&A hosted on Instagram this week in response to a question about the curious timing of Quest 3’s announcement, which came just days ahead of the reveal of Apple Vision Pro. He continued:
What we found out… especially last year… is that when we announce a new headset in September/October, a lot of people—especially when you already have headsets out in market—a lot of people have already made buying decisions in the summertime, or they’re kind of committed to a path, so you’re not capturing the full holiday season.
So we sent a note to [Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg] long before we even knew about WWDC timing or substance, saying ‘hey for Quest 3 we want to announce it early, so that people know it’s coming, so they can plan well in advance of the holiday season what they want to do’.
So that was our plan from a long time ago, and the timing worked out unbelievably well [laughs]. I’m not mad about it… I’m not saying I’m mad about it, I’m just saying that was the plan that we developed in terms of go-to-market, and it had nothing to do with [Vision Pro].
The announcement of Quest 3—which came four days before Apple’s Vision Pro reveal—was certainly curious as far as the company’s prior patterns. Compared to the kind of formal announcement we’ve seen, the new headset was first teased and then revealed on social media through Mark Zuckerberg’s feeds. Even when more formal information was shared shortly thereafter, the company didn’t share the headset’s full specs, instead promising more details to come at the annual XR event, Meta Connect, which wouldn’t be held for nearly four more months.
Regardless, Bosworth maintains the Quest 3 announcement was decided well before the company knew what Apple would reveal or when.
Bosworth, who heads Meta’s XR division, Reality Labs, also answered some other questions about Apple Vision Pro during the Q&A.
Q: Thoughts on Apple’s decision to have attached battery pack rather than all-in-one headset?
A: At some point these headsets are a physics problem. You can spend your thermals and your weight one way, or another way, but at some point the equation has to square. [Apple’s] headset, I think, is roughly in the same ballpark of weight as our headsets, and they wanted to have this battery life, so they wanted to go external with [the battery]. It doesn’t matter who you are, what company you are, who you work for… physics is a uniform belligerent to this space. We’re making progress hand-over-fist as an industry; I think Apple’s entry is going to help with that a lot. But yeah, you have to square the circle somehow, and they had to do it with an external battery pack and a cord.
Q: How does the Vision Pro change Meta’s roadmap?
A: Andy Grove—famous Intel CEO and kind of godfather of Silicon Valley—always used to say “only the paranoid survive,” and we try to embody that. You try to approach your work with a lot of humility. Whenever a great competitor comes out, whether it be the Pico, whether it be Apple Vision Pro, certainly; you’re trying to look and see, what did they do differently, and why? What did we miss? Did we get it wrong, or did they figure something out? So you try to learn from it. And then be humble about it. At the same time, you can’t constantly be chasing every competitor because then you’re getting thrown off your own game. You’re getting thrown off what you can uniquely do and what you’ve done right, and that they need to learn from. In our case I think we’ve got a great ecosystem, we’ve got a great set of devices, we’ve got a great price point. So it’s a balance to try to learn from them and not over-rotate on that. Nothing that we hadn’t looked at before […] we were focusing on gaze and touch for AR as well—it’s a natural AR interaction—is that something that needs to get more priority in VR? Not sure yet. So we’re looking at it… we’re not sure yet.
Meta today introduced a new developer feature called Super Resolution that’s designed to improve the look of VR apps and games on Quest. The company says the new feature offers better quality upscaling at similar costs as previous techniques.
Meta today announced the new Super Resolution feature for developers on the company’s XR developer blog. Available for apps built on the Quest V55 update and later, Super Resolution is a new upscaling method for applications that aren’t already rendering at the screen’s display resolution (as many do in order to meet performance requirements).
“Super Resolution is a VR-optimized edge-aware scaling and sharpening algorithm built upon Snapdragon Game Super Resolution with Meta Quest-specific performance optimizations developed in collaboration with the Qualcomm Graphics Team,” the company says.
Meta further explains that, by default, apps are scaled up to the headset’s display resolution with bilinear scaling, which is fast but often introduces blurring in the process. Super Resolution is presented as an alternative that can produce better upscaling results with low performance costs.
“Super Resolution is a single-pass spatial upscaling and sharpening technique optimized to run on Meta Quest devices. It uses edge- and contrast-aware filtering to preserve and enhance details in the foveal region while minimizing halos and artifacts.”
Upscaling using bilinear (left), Normal Sharpening (center), and Super Resolution (right). The new technique prevents blur without introducing as much aliasing. | Image courtesy Meta
Unlike the recent improvements to CPU and GPU power on Quest headsets, Super Resolution isn’t an automatic benefit to all applications; developers will need to opt-in to the feature, and even then, Meta warns that benefits from the feature will need to be assessed on an app-by-app basis.
“The exact GPU cost of Super Resolution is content-dependent, as Super Resolution devotes more computation to regions of the image with fine detail. The cost of enabling Super Resolution over the default bilinear filtering is lower for content containing primarily regions of solid colors or smooth gradients when compared to content with highly detailed images or objects,” the company explains.
Developers can implement Super Resolution into Quest apps on V55+ immediately, and those using Quest Link (AKA Oculus Link) for PC VR content can also enable the sharpening feature by using the Oculus Debug Tool and setting the Link Sharpening option to Quality.
UK Finance, which represents more than 300 companies, has written to the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, requesting that ministers make tech companies take responsibility for payment fraud on their platforms. Specifically, the lobby group is pointing the finger at Meta, which it claims is connected to over 60% of all push payment fraud.
An Authorised Push Payment (APP) scam, also known as bank transfer fraud, is a type of scam in which fraudsters trick individuals or businesses into authorising the transfer of funds from their bank accounts to accounts controlled by the criminals.
It typically involves social engineering techniques to deceive victims into believing that they are making legitimate payments or transfers. These include tactics such as brand impersonation, too-good-to-be-true crypto deals, online romances, overdue fines, or “relatives” asking for money.
As the victim is the one who initiates the payment, banks in most countries are reluctant to reimburse the funds. Starting in 2024, the government will require UK banks to reimburse fraud victims that have been tricked into sending money to fraudsters.
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With the new rules looming on the horizon, it is understandable that the UK finance industry is pushing for tech companies to take more responsibility for financial online crime.
UK fraud strategy to “incentivise” online scam investigation
According to a report from Outseer last year, APP scams now comprise 75% of all online banking payments fraud. Meanwhile, UK Finance claims that criminals stole £485.2mn through APPs last year alone.
Promisingly, this was down 17% from the year prior, but fears are that the recent step-change in generative AI could help turbo-charge fraudulent tactics online and make scams more sophisticated.
The UK government announced a new national fraud strategy in May this year, but stopped short of forcing tech companies to pay compensation to victims of online scams. It did impose a “duty of care” on large platforms to protect users from fraud and other negative content.
The data in the letter from UK Finance, as first reported by the Financial Times, says that platforms owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta — Facebook, Facebook Marketplace, Instagram, and WhatsApp — are the locations of 61% of all APP scams.
A spokesperson for the company told the FT that it is an industry-wide issue with scammers using increasingly sophisticated methods to defraud people in a range of ways, adding that Meta was working with the police to support their investigations.
According to the UK’s fraud strategy, tech companies must make it easy for users to report fraud on their platforms (“within a few simple clicks”). Furthermore, the strategy says it will “shine a light on which platforms are the safest, making sure that companies are properly incentivised to combat fraud.”
Depending on how the government will implement this measure, it would seem Meta has its work cut out for it. According to statistics from UK bank TSB earlier this year, when taking into account the three biggest three biggest fraud categories — purchase, impersonation, and investment fraud — as much as 80% occur on Meta’s platforms.
Facebook and Twitter have been blocked in China since 2009, but Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is hoping to get back in that country with Quest, according to a Wall Street Journal report.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the report maintains that Meta has held discussions with several Chinese tech companies, making the most progress with massive entertainment conglomerate Tencent.
The Meta-Tencent talks reportedly came to a head late last year, with Tencent Chairman Pony Ma deciding to proceed with the negotiation first and “see what deals they could reach,” WSJ reports.
Undoubtedly the most complicated bit of the talks would revolve around VR content distribution, and how it’s moderated for Chinese markets. It’s said a portion of Meta’s global offerings could be on offer alongside Tencent’s own apps and services.
In 2009, Facebook and Twitter were banned in China after breaching Beijing’s notoriously strict censorship laws; the ban is thought to have been a direct effort to quel the July 2009 Ürümqi riots that took place in the country’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.
More recently, Chinese executives were allegedly worried that Zuckerberg isn’t seen as “friendly to China” due to lingering tentions over prior accusations of technology theft by companies such as ByteDance, maker of TikTok.
A Meta spokesman declined to comment on WSJ’s report. Tencent didn’t respond to a request for comment.
This isn’t the first time Meta VR hardware has made a splash on the Chinese mainland. In 2018, Meta (then Facebook) penned a deal with Xiaomi to release a Chinese variant of Oculus Go, sold by Xiaomi as the ‘Mi VR Standalone’. At the time, this was something of a quid pro quo, as Xiaomi was tasked with manufacturing Oculus Go, giving it exclusive rights to the mainland Chinese market as a result.
No such manufacturing deal is in place with Meta Quest 3, which is coming this Fall for $500. In the end, Meta’s current strategy seems less about getting its subsidized hardware into the country, and more about driving a wedge into the Great Chinese Firewall so it can once again tap into the world’s fastest-growing economy.
