Mark Zuckerberg teases a picture of Cambria, to be launched on October, 11th

Today Meta has announced the date of the Meta Connect, the upcoming event by Meta in which it will announce its latest advancements for what concerns VR, AR, and the M-word. The event will take place at 10 am PT on October 11, and it will be fully virtual, like last year. You will be able to watch it on Reality Labs Facebook page.

The information on the event is very scarce, and more will be shared soon on its official page. We anyway know that John Carmack will have a speech from within VR (he confirmed that to me over Twitter), and that almost certainly Meta will announce its upcoming headset there.

The official information on the new device, codenamed Project Cambria, are very little, but actually leakers and data miners have already unveiled a lot about it, including the fact that the name will most probably be Meta Quest Pro. If you want a good recap of what we already know of this device, you can check out this good roundup article by Mixed.

It’s interesting anyway that for the first time, in the promotional images related to the Meta Connect, Meta has actually shown a photo of Cambria, exactly a cropped photo of Mark Zuckerberg wearing the device. This is like the first true official photo of the headset, and the fact that it has been shared together with the invite to the event, confirms that the headset will be launched there.

You can see the device here:

The photo is very dark, but using my super-pro Photoshop skills I put the brightness to over 9000 to see something more about the headset:

We can clearly see now a few things:

• The design featurin a crown that goes around the head, somewhat inspired by the one of HoloLens 2;
• A comfortable cushion on the nape
• One of the tracking cameras on the side of the headset
• One of the passthrough cameras on the front of the device (it’s that circle you can see on the top left corner of the image)
• A hole which is probably the 3.5mm jack for headphones on the headband
• A small button and a larger “button” always on the bottom part of the headband. The small one could be the power button of the device, while the larger one is actually not a button, but a hole. It is most probably one of the integrated speakers of the headset. You can see it better in this zoomed version of the image

• There are also two small circular metallic things close to the nose. They are also present in the CAD files leaked by Brad Lynch, but honestly I haven’t got exactly what they are… maybe something for face tracking? Or actually could be the electrodes for the charger, as “northbynortheast” suggested me over Twitter.

The headset looks also solid and with an elegant design. This doesn’t surprise me, since Meta does very elegant headsets since the Oculus Rift CV1.

I can’t wait for October, 11th to arrive, then! And you?

(Header image by Meta)