Meta teases ‘future headsets’ despite VR troubles, and an AI upgrade straight from science fiction

• Meta teased "future headsets" at its recent investor call
• Zuckerberg also suggested Meta wants to use AI to let you jump into videos
• No definitive plans or timelines were provided

Based on recent layoffs many had been wondering if this was the beginning of the end for Meta’s VR plans, but the company has reaffirmed that it’s still working on new tech in the space – including new hardware and a possible AI integration that’s truly sci-fi.

Speaking to investors following its latest quarterly earnings report, CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn’t talk too much about VR, perhaps unsurprisingly, instead focusing on smart glasses for which sales have “more than tripled” in the last year.

Initially not a great sign for VR’s future. However, Meta CFO Suan Li turned our hopes around when responding to a question from Deutsche Bank’s Benjamin Black on Reality Labs.

She said, “We continue to have optimism in the future of VR,” adding, “We are investing continually – going forward, rather, 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 wearables, and we are rebalancing our Reality Labs portfolio to reflect this. “

No more detail than that was revealed about these “future headsets”, but leaks have pointed to two possible devices that will land in 2026 and/or 2027.

One would be a ‘Quest 4’ that’s a large but more typical upgrade on its predecessor, and again come with a higher end and slightly lower end model like we saw with the Quest 3 and Quest 3S.

Then there’s the headset I’ve dubbed the Quest Pro 2. It’s set to be ultra-lightweight – with a design more similar to glasses or goggles than a headset – thanks to the battery and compute power being transferred to a puck you carry in your pocket. It would also be more productivity-focused rather than putting an emphasis on gaming.

An AI upgrade

The other major improvement we could see in VR is an emphasis on AI. Of course this is to be expected in the AI age, but Zuckerberg highlighted a truly sci-fi future use case during the presentation: “There’s definitely a version of the future where any video that you see, you can like tap on and jump into it.”

Now, the way Zuckerberg describes this future, it certainly isn’t one that we’ll see next week or maybe even in the next few years, but this would be a further enhancement of the AI-led tools we’re already seeing. which can turn 2D scenes into stereoscopic 3D.

Beyond VR, Zuckerberg’s words also suggest it might be a tool we see come to mobile platforms – which is also now the main focus for its Horizon metaverse. Being able to generate worlds from pictures – from our digital memories – would be a powerful creative tool for these kinds of immersive social experiences across platforms, and could be the differentiating factor Meta needs as its AI models lag behind rivals such as ChatGPT, Gemini and others.

These vague hardware references and AI promises don’t give us a firm timeline of when Meta’s next VR developments will drop, but it at least teases a next step that feels less utterly miserable for us VR fans.

The question remains, however, if Meta can win back some favor, or if upcoming devices like the Steam Frame will eat Meta’s lunch, as I suspect it might.

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