My predictions for Facebook Connect 2

Every year I make this prediction game about what Facebook is going to announce at Oculus/Facebook connect, and this year won’t be an exception! So here you are what I expect to be announced on Thursday… but before reading, remember that I have no inside info about what is going to happen, and it is all speculation! Some years ago I predicted that “Facebook will never release a cable to connect the Quest to the PC because that would kill the Rift”… well, you can see that it didn’t age pretty well :P… so take what I write here with a huge grain of salt!

Oculus Rift 3

Facebook will suddenly realize that PCVR is the future and… ok, no, I was just kidding. This is never going to happen.

New Facebook Name

We know it: Zuck is going to announce a full restructuring of all the Facebook group, under a parent company probably named Meta, Horizon, or something similar. It will be a watershed moment for Facebook, that will so completely transition from being a social media company to something bigger aimed at “bringing people together” with a full suite of products.

This should also serve to distance the present Facebook products from the “Facebook” branding, which has now a very bad reputation. But I don’t think it is going to work, since all people will know Facebook’s new name, and will just transfer their disapproval to it.

I also wonder if this means that Facebook Connect will change again its name next year… will it be the Meta Connect?

Oculus Quest 2 Pro / Oculus Quest 3

Facebook is going to announce the Oculus Quest 2 Pro. We all have seen the leaked images about how it will be, and also have seen the leaked video with the new form factor, so more or less we know what to expect:

• Improved design, that makes it look like bulky lab glasses
• Improved comfort, taking inspiration from HoloLens
• Hands tracking, eye tracking, face tracking, for better integration with social VR experiences
• Some sort of full body tracking… I don’t think accurate like the one from Kinect, but still enough for social VR experiences
• Full-RGB color passthrough
• Lightweight inside-out tracked controllers

The big unknowns are two. The first one is the chipset and the display: according to the rumors, it will still feature an XR2 chipset, not underclocked this time, and the same 4K display as Quest 2. If it is the case, the headset will be the Quest 2 Pro. In the quite improbable case that Qualcomm has created a new chip for them, like XR3, then we can expect a bump in the resolution of the display and the processing power, and the headset will be the Quest 3. I bet on the first option because usually Qualcomm announces the reference designs much before the manufacturers implement them.

The other unknown is the price: my bet is $5-600, because Eric For President tweeted months ago that he knew that Facebook was going to launch this fall a great headset, again hugely undercost like the Quest 2. If $500 will be the price, the device will become a must-buy for most XR enthusiasts.

I think Facebook will spend a lot of time showcasing the new headset, exploring its new features, announcing new content for it and new partners for it, and playing some cool trailers about it. Journalists and influencers will also be able to publish their reviews about it, because they have already received it (Ben Lang from Road To VR and MRTV tweeted about receiving an unexpected device at their doorstep).

Facebook should open the preorders the same day, with shipping in Q1 2022. They promised to not ship the new headset in 2021, so I guess it won’t ship immediately. But they may have also told a little lie, and in that case, the headset is going to ship before the holidays.

Oculus Quest “Light”

The Oculus Quest 2 Pro is going to win the heart of all us techies, but what about all the average consumers that don’t care much about full-body VR and passthrough AR and just want to watch 360 videos or play Beat Saber? And in case Facebook doesn’t ship the Pro in 2021, how to promote the Quest 2 during the holiday season?

I think that Facebook has two options in this sense:

1. Discount the Quest 2 to $199. We all know that the Quest 2 is selling well, but lowering its price at $199 for the holidays would make it one of the hottest gadgets of the season;
2. Release a no-controllers version for the Quest 2, dubbed “Quest Light” for $199. This would be a device dedicated for media consumption and lightweight games, sold at a very cheap price.

Considering that there is not much content just working with hands-tracking, I would bet on the first option… but who knows.

Horizon Worlds + Workrooms

The Quest 2 Pro, with its face and eye-tracking sensors, is ideal to be launched together with Horizon Worlds, Facebook’s social VR experience. Facebook has said that in 2021 it will just keep expanding the beta of the social VR space, exactly like in 2021 they shouldn’t sell the Quest 2 Pro.

I think that with the launch of Quest 2 Pro, Horizon will come out of beta. And since we are going to know the launch date of Quest 2 Pro, we are also going to know the launch date of Horizon Worlds. And at Facebook Connect, Facebook will show how Horizon has evolved up to now, and how many new features it will have at launch. I think that Quest 2 Pro and Horizon will have a tight integration… who knows if in the future the headset home will be in Horizon.

We will also get some news about Horizon Workrooms: how many people have used it up to now and some upcoming features for it.

The death of Quest 1?

Quest 1 is a nice headset, but it is too less powerful than Quest 2 and Quest 2 Pro, and it continuously lags behind Quest 2 for every new feature that gets implemented. Some of the coolest new games only target Quest 2, and for us developers keeping the compatibility of a game with both is a pain in the ass. It is only a ball and chain for all the content on Quest Store: why should I simplify the graphics of a game I am developing for Quest, that is already a very limiting platform, only to guarantee compatibility with an old device? I think it’s the right time to pull the plug on Quest 1 and let it be discontinued…

New content

Content is the king and Facebook knows it very well: one of the reasons people buy its headsets is for the great content catalog. I think Facebook will keep investing in it and at Facebook connect it will announce new games with interesting IP and also cool updates on the games of the studios that Facebook owns: in particular, I expect some special updates for Beat Saber and Population One.

I think we will also have some new info on the Assassin’s Creed and Splinter Cell games that Ubisoft is building for Facebook. I hope that for at least one of them we’ll get the release timing.

Of course, all content will be for Quest 2. PCVR is dead for Facebook.

Productivity

We will get some updates to Infinite Office and Horizon Workrooms to use better the Quest 2 as a productivity tool. This will be even more important for Quest 2 Pro, that being a prosumer tool, is directed to people that may use the headset to work.

Updates on Oculus Store

We will hear lots of success stories about developers on the Oculus Store. Someone from the Oculus team will tell us how many studios have earned more than $1M and more than $20M on the Quest store. They’ll show us how it is cool being on the Quest Store, without remembering that it is a privilege for a few studios.

I think we will also have an update on App Lab, the B-class store for Quest for us poor indies. There will be some announcements of new features to help the indies on the platform: for sure the introduction of IAP (it has already been teased), and I hope also some tools more for discoverability. It won’t be enough, but it will be better than nothing. Facebook knows that titles like Resident Evil 4 VR and Splinter Cell bring it much more money than us indies, so it will keep ignoring us.

Quest-oriented PCVR

Facebook announced at the previous Connect that it planned to unify the interfaces of Quest and Rift under only one interface for Quest users, so that if you were using Quest, you only saw the Quest interface, with the Link just allowing you to access the PC content from inside the Quest environment. I think we’ll hear about it again, plus I think that all PCVR ecosystem will start to become strongly Quest+Link oriented.

Facebook will also present new updates to Oculus Link and Air Link to try to get rid of Virtual Desktop.

Runtime improvements

Hands tracking is important for social VR spaces and can be of paramount importance if a Quest 2 Light gets released. For this reason, I think that Facebook will showcase some improvements regarding hands-tracking, that will make the tracking more robust, maybe also for the overlapping-hands situations.

We’ll also have new info on the new special Guardian of Quest 2 and Quest 2 Pro that will be able to detect people entering your playspace and will warn you by showing their outline inside your virtual experience.

I also imagine there will be other runtime updates that are going to be announced there.

Oculus Quest Pro For Business

Oculus Quest 2 Pro will be appealing for companies, so Facebook will present a Quest 2 Pro Business Edition costing $1200 targeted at competing with Vive Focus 3. The previous Quest 2 for business will have a price discount, and will cost $600 like Pico Neo 3 Pro. This way Facebook plans to be highly competitive also in the business sector.

Facebook will talk about some Oculus Quest business use cases: there will be some important companies (e.g. Accenture) showing the results they have obtained thanks to the use of VR headsets in their production processes.

Smartglasses updates

Having just launched Ray-Ban Stories, I can imagine Facebook talking about them, maybe also announcing some new upcoming features for them.

I also expect a new big teaser chapter on future AR glasses: Facebook will give us un update on the first year of Project Aria, and what are the results reached by this experiment. They will also tease us something related to future AR glasses and the future Facebook AR Cloud (e.g. spatial mapping, co-location, etc…). They will also showcase something about the wristband powered by CTRL+LABS technologies.

I don’t think they will announce the release date of their AR glasses, though. I think they will just give us a status update… I mean, revealing only what they want to reveal. They can’t disclose much of what they are working on, because Apple is listening.

Buzzwords

We’ll hear a lot of times the word “metaverse”. They’ll talk a lot about “privacy” and their principles for responsible development, but no one of us will believe them. They’ll say “diversity and inclusion” a lot of times. Lots of buzzwords, blablabla.

Carmack & Abrash

Carmack and Abrash will deliver their usual amazing tech talks… I will watch them in awe, and then I will cry in a corner because I am not as smart as they are.

Zuck will try to look human

Mark will try to look human, trying to emulate our enthusiasm and smiling, but he will fail miserably. Zuck, we know that you are a robo-alien-lizard… do your coming out! You will feel better after that.

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And that’s it for these predictions of mine… I hope that at least 50% of them will be true! What do your think of them? What are yours? Let me know in the comments or on social media channels… let’s play the speculation game together!