That Facebook was preparing to bet everything on virtual reality was known, however some rumors would finally be able to provide a concrete roadmap of what the Big Tech action plans are. From today to 2024 Meta foresees the release of at least four different VR viewerswhich are designed to be “affordable” by multiple income brackets.
Meta dreams of VR headsets in every home
The lineup we are talking about refers to what is written in an internal document of the company intercepted by the newspaper The Information. Although the document is difficult to verify, its contents adequately reflect the aims of Meta, which desperately needs to equip its users with personal VR headsets. In fact, the financial results for the first quarter of 2022 have been published in these days and the whole world has not failed to point out that the investment of CEO Mark Zuckerberg in virtual reality is for now a hole in the water.
The company has lost just under 3 billion dollars in the so-called “metaverse” sector, which is fatally interconnected with the Reality Labs division, a former Oculus division specializing in virtual reality. Meta is convinced – partially rightly – that its VR dream is slowed down by the fact that the masses lack the hardware needed to enjoy digital worlds, so the only way to make the initial investment pay off is to make sure there there is at least one headset in each home.
The most expensive, but also the most powerful, model will be the one already anticipated Project Cambria, a tech creature that sources inside the company have described as a «laptop to wear on your face». The tool is designed to ensure high performance and to provide sharp, high-resolution images that will make the text easy to read. Ideal if you want to read your e-mails in the digital space of Horizon Worlds for whatever reason.
Project Cambria will therefore be equipped with a longer-lived battery, cameras that will allow it to take advantage of augmented reality, an eye movement tracker and, partially disturbing, a facial expression analysis system. This last function is openly designed to bring the user’s micro-expressions back to his avatar, however the trust that public opinion places in Meta is now reduced to an all-time low and many wonder if the company is preparing to collect an increasingly powerful amount of data was abusive.
Dystopian futures aside, Project Cambria indeed offers itself as an avant-garde tool, yet high technology pays for itself. At the moment there is talk of a cost at launch of ben 799 dollars. Taking into account the exchange rate usually applied to the tech sector, in Europe it could easily reach 799 euros. Cambria will therefore be followed at a distance by Project Funstonan updated version of the same about which at least for now very little is known.
For those who do not feel like proceeding with such an expensive investment, between 2023 and 2024 Meta will also have on the market two VR headsets from the Quest brand, machines which are currently known under the code names Stinson and Cardiff. These will be more suited to gaming and leisure than desk work, however they should still meet the basic requirements of anyone wishing to navigate the Zuckerberg “metaverse”. Stinson will be the first to debut and will be characterized by better performances, Cardiff will therefore be added to the Quest library after a few months, but with a “budget” price that has not yet been adequately defined.