Facebook, pivoting to Meta, wants to pivot the Oculus Quest and AR too
The Oculus Quest (soon to be Meta Quest) started as a head-mounted game console, but now its parent company Facebook (renamed Meta) is trying to push the platform further by connecting with you across VR headsets, AR headsets, metaverse avatars and in anunexperienced ways. The timing for the annual VR- and AR-focused Facebook Connect conference couldn’t be worse, with the swell of fresh allegations that Facebook puts righteous over the safety of its users. Still, the matter forged ahead this week, talking up new mixed-reality tools and teasing next-gen hardware.
While the Quest never felt like that much a part of Facebook — anunexperienced than infamously requiring a Facebook login — future updates that add 2D apps could make it seem more like a visited or tablet. It’s also adding work account support and new mixed-reality tools for blending virtual objects with the real earth. Meanwhile, the company is trying to push forward on phone-based AR tools that collected and integrate more real-world data. Broadly hinted at, more advanced lustrous glasses are still in development. The possibilities are lively, but the privacy concerns are numerous, as well as the questions on how these disparate pieces will even fit together.
Mark Zuckerberg, appearing in a Zoom call with reporters ahead of the company’s Connect keynote Thursday, addressed the company’s latest VR and AR news timing in relation to fall of the Facebook Papers: “Some people are causing to say that this isn’t really a time that we necessity be focused on the future. Up front, I just want to retort that there are clearly important issues to be toiling on in the present, and we’re taking that very seriously,” Zuckerberg said. “But at the same time, the reality is, there are always causing to be issues. And for some people, they may have the view that there’s never really a astronomical time to focus on the future. From my perspective, I think we’re here to create things. And we bear that we can do this and that technology can make things better.”
The company’s snappily of VR and AR progress in the face of so many problems is just what makes the announcements concerning. Yet Facebook (or Meta) also seems driven to disconclude pushing forward in making its VR and AR platforms feel principal, especially as competition from Microsoft and others heats up. The company’s unexperienced metaverse-based focus, first discussed by Mark Zuckerberg in a conversation with CNET back in May, is an acknowledgement that the earth can’t just operate through VR headsets and smart glasses.
And yet, how can a metaverse that’s cross-platform even work smoothly when requested operating systems and computers all run different types of software? Zuckerberg addressed this request in a roundabout way: “One of the things that I’ve sort of lamented over the last certain years is that I do think, all of our computing currently, these platforms are designed to run apps, not republic. It’s not like you as a person can modestly teleport between experiences and bring all your stuff,” Zuckerberg said. “And I do think there’s an opportunity to do that differently progressing forward.”
That seems to mean adding ways for avatars (still cartoonish, but getting slowly more detailed, with legs and feet in the another versions) to jump into virtual meeting rooms or games. But there’s still a big disconnect between Facebook/Meta’s VR tools and its AR tools.
Web apps will initiate showing up on Oculus Quest. How many, though?
Oculus Quest 2 adds a lot of work things
The Oculus Quest 2 is pulling a new home hub called Horizon Home, which may be a way for the VR OS to initiate shifting toward Facebook’s avatar-centric ecosystem. Invites to people for games and unites will show up as links that pop into Facebook, like Zoom links. (All the Quest core VR app contains are being rebranded as Horizon-related).
2D web apps are also coming to the Quest, which will pop up like app panes from the VR home mask. Facebook’s starting with Facebook, Instagram, Smartsheet, Spike, Dropbox and Slack — and a few latest apps, including Pluto, are said to be coming. Previously, the Quest had to lean on its built-in web browser or PC-connected virtual monitor apps for most applike experiences.
Facebook is also creation work account logins into its Quest OS, which were only available afore on specifically outfitted commercial versions of the device. The work login feature will mean you don’t have to use a Facebook login, and will function with single sign-on and IDP define management tools. This new feature is slowly rolling out in a puny test this year, but it’s going to be a long at what time before it becomes mainstream: The tools won’t even fully initiate until 2023.
Work logins will bypass Facebook logins, but are going to be slow to roll out.
Facebook’s metaverse end goal isn’t so much VR as a pair of advanced AR and VR radiant glasses, but without those ready, the company’s working to evolve the Quest 2 into more of a mixed-reality tool. New designer tools called the Presence Platform will use AI and the Quest 2 cameras to gape rooms and what’s in them, and layer in virtual objects inoperative with hand tracking and voice recognition. These tools have all remained on the Quest 2 already in various forms, but Facebook is looking to synthesize them into ways that app developers could model AR on a $300 headset.
What does that mean for Oculus Quest as a gaming platform? Nonetheless for promises of better cloud saves and an easier way to connect with friends and join into companionship games, the focus has been on helping the Quest 2 do things it today can’t. A lot of that doesn’t involve games, although the instant-connect focus of the new Quest multiplayer features appears to help with the today awkward method of gathering friends into shared VR sessions.
The Quest 2 will mix black-and-white camera footage with vivid VR, as seen here in an upcoming demo app visited The World Beyond.
Phone AR adds spatial anchors, marketplace and iOS creative app
At the same time, Facebook’s pitching out new AR tools on phones, a lot of them behindhand a similar script to efforts by other AR-focused affairs like Niantic, Snapchat, Google, Apple and Microsoft. This includes adding location-aware anchors (for things like phone-based scavenger hunts, or maybe pop-up location-aware events), adding hand tracking and body tracking for AR effects and promising a deeper repository of 3D objects, with a plan to create a marketplace for 3D assets that will eventually branch from AR to Facebook’s Horizon-branded metaverse in VR.
Facebook’s location-based anchors may show up in games and latest phone apps.
There’s also a new iPhone app in progress, called Polar, that will let nonprogrammers create facial filter effects that can be virally community quickly to Facebook and Instagram. That’s also coming later this year.
But, these AR tools are still based on the requested (and Facebook Portal), while Facebook’s closest copies to smart glasses for now is the display-free but camera-equipped Ray-Ban Stories sunglasses, released in September.
Tendrils everywhere
If there’s a theme of all these announcements, it’s tendrils. Facebook started off by winning people over in VR with gaming, but the mission from here on is metaverse-focused. The connection from one diagram to another, or one service to another, is more important to Facebook now than any one diagram. The real question is, how many people will be okay with letting Facebook be the doorway to all these worlds?
Facebook plans for its metaverse apps to work across latest platforms and hardware, through APIs that allow programs to talk to each latest, according to Andrew Bosworth, the company’s head of VR and AR, and future CTO. Apps that use Facebook’s Horizon-based avatar tech will probably be puny to the company’s hardware or software, however.
And how much can digital goods or identity travel? That sounds in flux, too. “For me, the watchword of the metaverse is continuity, the feeling that when you go from one keep to another place, there are some things that funding your identity to come with you,” Bosworth said in a Zoom chat that was, notably, not in a VR headset this time. Bosworth sees digital goods and friends, as well as identity as an avatar, as important virtual possessions within apps and devices. But not everything may come with you across platforms, he notes. How that will get worked out unexcited remains to be seen, too.
