It is that time of the year when I make predictions about the upcoming Oculus/Facebook/Meta Connect, the main event of the year for Oculus/Facebook/Meta since a lot of time. And it is also the time that I dream my predictions are correct… something that… is not always true (like that time I predicted the Quest was not going to be connected to a PC…). But I still love making speculations, so let me play this game with you: what can we expect from the upcoming Meta Connect?
The buzzword salad
I expect the very short summary of the upcoming Connect will be: Metaverse, metaverse, metaverse… content… diversity, inclusion… community… privacy… enterprise… and metaverse, metaverse, metaverse again! The more buzzwords, the better, of course.
Meta Quest Pro
This is an easy prediction because everything has already been leaked about this device. We had so many leaks about the upcoming Meta headset, that I could go on stage and present it in place of Mark Zuckerberg.
On October, 11th at 10 am PT, during his usual keynote, Meta CEO will officially unveil and launch the Meta Quest Pro, previously named Project Cambria. It will be a headset for mixed reality, targeted at prosumers/enterprise users.
These are the rumored specifications:
- 2,160 x 2,160 LCD screen per eye
- Pancake Lenses
- 16MP Color Camera for Color Passthrough
- Eye + Face Tracking (IR Camera based)
- Qualcomm XR2+ Gen 1 SoC
- 12GB LPDDR5 RAM
- 256GB SSD
- WiFi 6E Support
- ~5000 mAh battery
- Inside-out tracked controllers (thanks to onboard cameras)
It is going to be a very interesting device, even if quite expensive. The official info is that it is going to cost “more than $800”, and Brad Lynch said that the price will be $1500 with the release day set for October, 25th. I hope it may cost a bit less, around $1200, but it is still a lot of money to spend on an XR device. The information on price and launch date are the only ones we are not sure about, yet, so it will be the only thing it will be interesting to discover.
Mixed Reality software
It would be totally useless to launch the Quest Pro without also announcing some software already implementing the special mixed reality feature of the device. So for sure Meta is going to showcase some software that uses it. I would bet on:
- Some “first steps” software for AR
- Immersed, because it already leaked a video of the feature in use by its software
- Some prototyping/design tool, because modeling 3D assets to put in your real environment can be very useful
- Some fitness experience, because with passthrough you can train in full safety
- Some games (like the fencing game Zuck teased), because games are always cool to show
Together with the launch, thanks to the capabilities of the device, I also expect the announcement of the upcoming new features for the Presence Platform SDK, like for instance automatic room mapping.
Quest 3 teasing
Pico has just shown a device that is much better and cheaper than Quest 2. Meta can’t compete with it with the Quest Pro, because it’s too expensive. So it needs to tease the Quest 3 to implicitly tell people “yeah, the Pico 4 is nice, but if you just wait a few months more, you can get the Quest 3, which is much better”. In fact, we already had some timely leaks on Quest 3 by “the usual VR leakers”, and I have some suspect that Meta voluntarily left some information for them to discover as subtle marketing means.
I expect an official tease of Quest 3, like last year there was the tease of the “Project Cambria”. According to my friend VR Nima, it could already launch in November. It seems a bit early to me, but nothing is impossible.
Together with the Quest 3 tease, it could come the official announcement of the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR 2 Gen 2, which is expected to have double the power of the chipset in the Quest 2. Meta and Qualcomm just started a strategic partnership, so it could be a possibility that Qualcomm teases/announces the next chipset at a Meta event, where at the same time Meta could say that it is going to use it inside the Quest 3.
AR update
Meta wants to produce AR glasses. I expect an update on “Project Nazare” or whatever will be AR-related. But not any kind of announcements, because we already know that the budget cuts pushed the launch of AR glasses to something like 2026.
Content announcement
At every Connect there is the announcement of some cool VR titles, and this won’t be an exception. So, I forecast:
- Updates on at least one among Assassin’s Creed VR and GTA San Andreas VR
- The announcement of a few other games and partnerships
- The reveal of a new big upcoming game. If I had to make a bold prediction (which won’t come out to be true), I would say either Roblox or Fortnite, since both of them are rumored to come to Quest. I would love for this to be true because it would increase the number of VR users by a lot
Horizon and the metaverse
Zuck will update us on how what he is doing is bringing us closer to the metaverse (or the metADverse). Then he will say that Horizon is their shoot towards the metaverse, and will say some metric about Horizon to prove to us that it is a success, while actually very few people are using it regularly.
He will officially launch Horizon worldwide, and together with it, the mobile and web versions. I expect also a corporate joke about his cringy selfie, together with the reveal of future renewed graphics for both Meta Horizon Worlds and Meta Avatars.
Then there will be some blabbering about the content creator community, with the reveal of the upcoming creator economy on Horizon and money promised to Horizon World creators, since he hopes that with money, can make this platform relevant.
Quest for enterprise
Quest Pro is an enterprise device, so I expect more clarity on Meta’s enterprise plans for XR. After the shutdown of Oculus For Business, Meta’s enterprise strategy became very cloudy, with the enterprise Quest becoming the same device as the consumer Quest. A roadmap for the evolution of the enterprise offering was revealed, but the situation remained kinda confused. Now, with the launch of an enterprise-oriented device, it can’t be like this anymore, so for sure there will be the reveal of the new enterprise offering for XR by Meta.
High-end ecosystem (PC & Co)
We all know about the mediocre computational power of Quest 2. Even if the Quest 3 will be much better, it will still be terrible if compared to the performances of an RTX4090 graphics card. So letting people use Quest/Quest Pro with a PC is still relevant.
Currently Meta offers to Quest users both tethered connection with PC, and wireless connection with PC, and it is allegedly experimenting with Cloud rendering with a service codenamed Avalanche.
I expect that finally, Meta will unify the interface of Quest and Rift, so that to make Quest interface the one to use for PCVR content too, as the Vive Focus Plus did years ago. PCVR software (Quest Home) is now abandonware, so it should be substituted by something else.
Meta will also reiterate on the D-Link dongle just released for Air Link. And I think it will tease cloud rendering, which anyway will be useful also for enterprises.
Michael Abrash
Michael Abrash will say something about the experiments that Meta is doing related to the AR Cloud, Brain Computer Interfaces, Mixed reality, and such. He will give us a glimpse of the R&D Meta is carrying on, and maybe give us additional insights on the HoloCake headset that Meta teased a few weeks ago. He will show that Meta has a lot of technologies is working on, so it’s ready to compete with Apple for the upcoming years.
Unluckily, I think his part at Connect will be like last year: a few minutes, with some interesting insights, but nothing more than that. He has stopped making predictions a few years ago already.
John Carmack
I mean, we are all waiting for it. John will say a lot of things about the technologies Meta is working on, and as usual, I will understand 50% of what he says. He will criticize Meta for some decisions, praise it for others, and will remind us that the metaverse is very distant from now. And I will love whatever he will say.
The Sauce
There will be a bottle of sauce somewhere, I guarantee it. Zuck loves the sauce. He feels so human with it.
Some surprises?
Every year, I hope for Connect to totally surprise me… and sometimes it happens, sometimes not. I really hope for the unexpected to happen, like I don’t know… Tim Cook going on stage and announcing that Meta and Apple are fusing in a single company called Mapple. (This would be kinda disturbing, actually…)
Zuck, surprise us!
And that’s it for my predictions which won’t come true… what are yours instead? I’m very curious of playing this game with you, so please let me know your predictions in the comments here below or on my social media channels!
(Header image by Meta)