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.
Meta announced the high-flying superhero game Marvel’s Iron Man VR (2020) has a new permanent price, bringing it to $30.
Once a PSVR exclusive, Iron Man VR on Quest 2 and Quest Pro lets you suit up as Tony Stark and take to the sky to fight evil. The action-adventure game is now available at a new price of $30, or 25% off the original $40 purchase price.
When it launched on PSVR in July 2020, we gave it a rating of ‘Great’ in our full review, calling it VR’s “first great superhero game.” We liked it so much at the time, we later awarded it with the PSVR Game of the Year in 2020.
What makes Iron Man VR so great? It’s packed with unique mechanics and a full course of fun and engaging content—not to mention an actually worthwhile story.
Here’s how developers Camoflaj describe it:
Tap into your inner Super Hero as you step into Iron Man’s armor and blast into the skies. Explore Tony’s garage to customize and upgrade an arsenal of gear, gadgets, and weapons. Hit the afterburners and feel the rush of flying hundreds of miles an hour. Use all of Tony Stark’s resources to find the mysterious villain Ghost and her army of hacked Stark drones. Experience this action-packed immersive Iron Man adventure now.
Meta today announced a new VR game subscription service that will give you access to two hand-picked Quest games per month, priced at $8 per month, or $60 annually.
Called Meta Quest+, the subscription service will be available to Quest 2, Quest Pro and eventually Quest 3 users.
Similar to PlayStation’s PS Plus service, Meta is offering up two specific redeemable titles on the first of each month which you can download and keep for as long as you’re a paid member.
Meta says members can cancel at any time, which would mean you’d lose access to each game you redeemed, although the company says rejoining allows you to gain access to those previously redeemed titles.
The service is kicking off in July with Cloudhead Games’ physical action-rhythm FPS Pistol Whip and the nostalgia-fueled arcade adventure Pixel Ripped 1995 from ARVORE Immersive Experiences.
August is set to have Mighty Coconut’s highly-rated Walkabout Mini Golf and FPS roguelite MOTHERGUNSHIP: FORGE from Terrible Posture Games.
Meta Quest+ is set to cost $8 per month, or billed for $60 annually, a 37% savings over the monthly charge. You can learn more and also sign up here.
Meta says Quest+ titles are eligible for App Sharing across accounts, although if you happen to already own any of the games on offer monthly, you’ll just have to stick around to see whether something comes up that you don’t already own.
To sweeten the pot, the company is doing a deal for July that reduces the first month’s charge to $1, which is then followed by the regular $8 per month. That specific offer ends July 31st, 2023.
While Quest+ has been the subject of rumors for the past few months, it wasn’t clear which route the company would go—whether it would be a Viveport-style affair that allows you to pick from a pool of eligible games, or what they revealed today, a highly curated system like PS Plus. It’s an interesting route which could signal they’re expecting a substantial raise in new users in the coming months, as the company is set to launch its $500 Quest 3 headset September 27th, 2023, which has come along with a price reduction of Quest 2 to the original $300 price point.
Meta announced it’s reducing age requirements for Quest users, bringing the previous 13+ minimum down to 10+. The company says the policy change will come alongside new parent-managed accounts for Quest 2 and the upcoming Quest 3, which the company says will help keep preteens safe.
As anyone who has dipped their toes into social VR apps such as Rec Room or VRChat can probably attest, young kids are broadly already using VR headsets. Now Meta is introducing a scheme that will allow 10, 11 and 12-year-olds to have their own parent-managed accounts for the first time.
Slated to launch later this year, Meta says in a blogpost that its new parent-managed Meta accounts will require preteens to get their parent’s approval to set up an account, giving adults control over what apps their preteens can download from the Meta app store.
Image courtesy Meta
These parent-managed accounts will include controls to manage things like screen time limits, privacy and safety settings, and access to specific types of content, which will specify whether apps have a social component.
Additionally, Meta says preteens won’t be served ads, and parents will be able to choose whether their child’s usage data will be shared with Meta. Parents will also be able to delete profiles, including all of the data associated with it, the company says.
That’s a fairly strong policy reversal. At the time of this writing, Meta’s Safety Center portal maintains that Meta VR headsets “are not toys” and that younger children have “greater risks of injury and adverse effects than older users.”
Notably, Meta’s own social VR app Meta Horizon Worlds is also retaining its 13+ age requirement in the US and Canada (18+ in Europe).
Meta has undeniably been the lone looming Goliath in a field of smaller Davids in the XR scene for years now. With Apple finally making its entrance into the market, Meta won’t be able to go at its own pace.
Apple’s new headset might be an absurd $3,500, putting it in a completely different class than Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 at $500, let alone the Quest 2 now at $300. But the pressure will still be on as comparisons are made between the experience Apple has crafted and what Meta offers.
After all, there’s no denying that while the Vision Pro is packed full of hardware, and has the benefit of Apple’s proprietary and powerful M2 chips, so much of what the headset is doing right is about the software experience rather than the fidelity that’s unlocked with the hardware.
Great Hardware, Struggling Software
The thing is, Meta’s headsets are plenty capable. Quest 2 is still a solid product that is in many ways still best in class and Quest 3 only promises to up the ante later this year with more power, higher resolution, improved lenses, and better passthrough AR. Meta’s hardware has always been quite impressive, even as far back as the original Oculus Rift CV1.
But on the software side the company has seriously struggled to make usability a priority. For all the lessons the company learned about the power of reducing friction in VR—by building a standalone headset that doesn’t need a computer or external tracking beacons—there has been seemingly little emphasis on making the same reduction in friction by creating a cohesive interface between Quest’s system interface, and Meta’s own first-party apps; let alone providing a set of clear and useful guidelines so that developers and users alike can benefit from a common user experience.
Lean on Me
Meta has leaned substantially on third-party developers to make using its headsets worthwhile to use. Game developers have done the painstaking work of refining how users should control their apps and interact with their worlds in entertaining ways. When you’re inside of a VR game, the developer is fully controlling the experience to make it cohesive and enjoyable, while sussing out the pitfalls that would turn off users—like bugs, convoluted menus, and inconsistent interactions.
If Meta’s headsets didn’t have games—but still did everything else they’re capable of—they would be dead in the water because of how painful it can be to use the headset outside of carefully crafted game experiences designed to entertain. On the other hand, Apple Vision Pro has a minimal emphasis on gaming (at least at the outset), but is spending significant effort to make everything else the headset does easy and consistent. By doing so, Apple is ensuring that the headset will be great for more than just gaming.
Despite the price difference between Vision Pro and Quest headsets, Meta is still going to have to stare this thing in the face and come to grips with what it could be doing better—for users, developers, and itself. The good news, at least, is that much of the room for improvement is in the software side of things.
The Vacuum
Until now, Meta has had no serious competition in this space. Its headsets—despite the criticisms I’ve laid out here—have consistently offered the best value in their class, with great hardware and a great game library, all at a very attractive price that others have largely been unable to match.
That’s made it hard for other headset makers to compete and left Meta little need to respond even if other companies do something better or innovative. It’s also meant that developers and users have very little leverage over what Meta decides to do—after all, where else are they going to go if they want an affordable standalone headset with the best library of content?
Meta has been able to create a vacuum in the consumer VR space which on the surface might look like success… but in reality, it has left Meta unfocused on what it needs to do to make its headsets appeal to a broader audience.
Better for Everyone
Now we have Apple in the game, ready to challenge Meta on hardware and the software experience. Price advantage is clearly in Meta’s favor, but it’s going to need to up its game, otherwise it risks losing not just customers, but more importantly developers, who might see greener grass on the other side—especially if they’re looking forward to a future where Apple’s headset comes down in price.
Apple’s entrance into the market might seem like a threat, but ultimately Meta now gets to sit back and examine all the hard work Apple has done over the years, then choose the best ideas to incorporate into its own offerings, while ignoring what it sees as missteps by Apple.
In the end, Apple’s headset is going to force Meta’s headsets to get better, faster. And that’s good for everyone, including Meta.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t been shy about addressing the elephant in the room: with Apple Vision Pro, the Cupertino tech giant is officially entering a market that, up until now, Meta has basically owned. In a meeting with Meta employees, Zuckerberg thinks that while Apple Vision Pro “could be the vision of the future of computing […] it’s not the one that I want”
As reported by The Verge, Zuckerberg seems very confident in the company’s XR offerings, and is less impressed with Apple’s design tradeoffs. During a companywide meeting, Zuckerberg said that with Vision Pro, Appe has “no kind of magical solutions” and that they haven’t bypassed “any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of.” He calls that “the good news.”
Largely, Zuckerberg says Apple is making some telling design tradeoffs, as its higher resolution displays, advanced software, and external battery comes alongside a $3,500 price tag—or seven times more than Meta’s upcoming Quest 3 mixed reality standalone.
Photo by Road to VR
But it’s also about ethos. Zuckerberg says the companies’ respective headsets represent a divide in company philosophy, as Apple products are typically developed to appeal to high income consumers. “We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests,” he said.
“More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways,” Zuckerberg continued. “Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want.”
The Meta chief echoed some of these statements on the Lex Fridman podcast where he spoke about his opinions on Apple Vision Pro, noting that Apple’s mixed reality headset offers a “certain level of validation for the category.” Because Vision Pro will cost so much though, Zuckerberg maintains Quest 3 will overall benefit as people inevitably gravitate to towards the cheaper, more consumer-friendly option.
Here’s Zuckerberg’s full statement, sourced from the companywide address:
Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.
But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.
More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.
The last, third day of AWE USA 2023 took place on Friday, June 2. The first day of AWE is largely dominated by keynotes. A lot of air on the second day is taken up by the expo floor opening. By the third day, the keynotes are done, the expo floor starts to get packed away, and panel discussions and developer talks rule the day. And Apple ruled a lot of those talks.
Bracing for Impact From Apple
A big shift is expected this week as Apple is expected to announce its entrance into the XR market. The writing has been on the wall for a long time.
Rumors have probably been circulating for longer than many readers have even been watching XR. ARPost started speculating in 2018 on a 2019 release. Five years of radio silence later and we had reports that the product would be delayed indefinitely.
The rumor mill is back in operation with an expected launch this week (Apple’s WWDC23 starts today) – with many suggesting that Meta’s sudden announcement of the Quest 3 is a harbinger. Whether an Apple entrance is real this time or not, AWE is bracing itself.
Suspicion on Standards
Let’s take a step back and look at a conversation that happened on AWE USA 2023 Day Two, but is very pertinent to the emerging Apple narrative.
The “Building Open Standards for the Metaverse” panel moderated by Moor Insights and Strategy Senior Analyst Anshel Sag brought together XR Safety Initiative (XRSI) founder and CEO Kavya Pearlman, XRSI Advisor Elizabeth Rothman, and Khronos Group President Neil Trevett.
Apple’s tendency to operate outside of standards was discussed. Even prior to their entrance into the market, this has caused problems for XR app developers – Apple devices even have a different way of sensing depth than Android devices. XR glasses tend to come out first or only on Android in part because of Android’s more open ecosystem.
“Apple currently holds so much power that they could say ‘This is the way we’re going to go.’ and the Metaverse Standards Forum could stand up and say ‘No.’,” said Pearlman, expressing concern over accessibility of “the next generation of the internet”.
Trevett expressed a different approach, saying that standards should present the best option, not the only option. While standards are more useful the more groups use them, competition is helpful and shows diversity in the industry. And diversity in the industry is what sets Apple apart.
“If Apple does announce something, they’ll do a lot of education … it will progress how people use the tech whether they use open standards or not,” said Trevett. “If you don’t have a competitor on the proprietary end of the spectrum, that’s when you should start to worry because it means that no one cares enough about what you’re doing.”
Hope for New Displays
On Day Three, KGOn Tech LLC’s resident optics expert Karl Guttag presented an early morning developer session on “Optical Versus Passthrough Mixed Reality.” Guttag has been justifiably critical of Meta Quest Pro’s passthrough in particular. Even for optical XR, he expressed skepticism about a screen replacement, which is what the Apple headset is largely rumored to be.
Karl Guttag
“One of our biggest issues in the market is expectations vs. reality,” said Guttag. “What is hard in optical AR is easy in passthrough and vice versa. I see very little overlap in applications … there is also very little overlap in device requirements.”
A New Generation of Interaction
“The Quest 3 has finally been announced, which is great for everyone in the industry,” 3lbXR and 3lb Games CEO Robin Moulder said in her talk “Expand Your Reach: Ditch the Controllers and Jump into Mixed Reality.” “Next week is going to be a whole new level when Apple announces something – hopefully.”
Robin Moulder
Moulder presented the next round of headsets as the first of a generation that will hopefully be user-friendly enough to increase adoption and deployment bringing more users and creators into the XR ecosystem.
“By the time we have the Apple headset and the new Quest 3, everybody is going to be freaking out about how great hand tracking is and moving into this new world of possibilities,” said Moulder.
More on AI
AI isn’t distracting anyone from XR and Apple isn’t distracting anyone from AI. Apple appearing as a conference theme doesn’t mean that anyone was done talking about AI. If you’re sick of reading about AI, at least read the first section below.
Lucid Realities: A Glimpse Into the Current State of Generative AI
After two full days of people talking about how AI is a magical world generator that’s going to take the task of content creation off of the shoulders of builders, Microsoft Research Engineer Jasmine Roberts set the record straight.
Jasmine Roberts
“We’ve passed through this techno-optimist state into dystopia and neither of those are good,” said Roberts. “When people think that [AI] can replace writers, it’s not really meant to do that. You still need human supervisors.”
AI not being able to do everything that a lot of people think it can isn’t the end of the world. A lot of the things that people want AI to do is already possible through other less glamorous tools.
“A lot of what people want from generative AI, they can actually get from procedural generation,” said Roberts. “There are some situations where you need bespoke assets so generative AI wouldn’t really cut it.”
Roberts isn’t against AI – her presentation was simply illustrating that it doesn’t work the way that some industry outsiders are being led to believe. That isn’t the same as saying that it doesn’t work. In fact, she brought a demo of an upcoming AI-powered Clippy. (You remember Clippy, right?)
Augmented Ecologies
Roberts was talking about the limitations of AI. The “Augmented Ecologies” panel moderated by AWE co-founder Tish Shute, saw Three Dog Labs founder Sean White, Morpheus XR CTO Anselm Hook, and Croquet founder and CTO David A. Smith talking about what happens when AI is the new dominant life form on planet Earth.
From left to right: Tish Shute, Sean White, Anselm Hook, and David Smith
“We’re kind of moving to a probabilistic model, it’s less deterministic, which is much more in line with ecological models,” said White.
This talk presented the scenario in which developers are no longer the ones running the show. AI takes on a life of its own, and that life is more capable than ours.
“In an ecology, we’re not necessarily at the center, we’re part of the system,” said Hook. “We’re not necessarily able to dominate the technologies that are out there anymore.”
This might scare you, but it doesn’t scare Smith. Smith described a future in which AI becomes the legacy that can live in environments that humans never can, like the reaches of space.
“The metaverse and AI are going to redefine what it means to be human,” said Smith. “Ecosystems are not healthy if they are not evolving.”
“No Longer the Apex”
On the morning of Day Two, the Virtual World Society and the VR/AR Association hosted a very special breakfast. Invited were some of the most influential leaders in the immersive technology space. The goal was to discuss the health and future of the XR industry.
The findings will be presented in a report, but some of the concepts were also presented at “Spatial Computing for All” – a fireside chat with Virtual World Society Founder Tom Furness, HTC China President Alvin Graylin, and moderated by technology consultant Linda Ricci.
The major takeaway was that the industry insiders aren’t particularly worried about the next few years. After that, the way in which we do work might start to change and that might have to change the ways that we think about ourselves and value our identities in a changing society.
AWE Is Changing Too
During the show wrap-up, Ori Inbar had some big news. “AWE is leveling up to LA.” This was the fourteenth AWE. Every AWE, except for one year when the entire conference was virtual because of the COVID-19 pandemic, has been in Santa Clara. But, the conference has grown so much that it’s time to move.
“I think we realized this year that we were kind of busting at the seams,” said Inbar. “We need a lot more space.”
The conference, which will take place from June 18-20 will be in Long Beach, with “super, super early bird tickets” available for the next few weeks.
Yes, There’s Still More
Most of the Auggie Awards and the winners of Inbar’s climate challenge were announced during a ceremony on the evening of Day Two. During the event wrap-up, the final three Auggies were awarded. We didn’t forget, we just didn’t have room for them in our coverage.
So, there is one final piece of AWE coverage just on the Auggies. Keep an eye out. Spoiler alert, Apple wasn’t nominated in any of the categories.
