On Tuesday, Meta announced its plans for the augmented and virtual reality hardware to the employees in Meta’s Reality Labs division. Company is ready to release its first pair of smart glasses with a display in 2025 and full-fledged AR glasses in 2027. Mark Zuckerberg wants these glasses to be released as the “iPhone moment”
Virtual Reality
Meta’s Quest 3 headset is ready for the market this year and will be thinner and more powerful compared to the Quest 2 headset that costs less by $400. Vice-President at Meta Mark Rabkin who is leading VR, reported that the company has sold approximately 20 million headset till date.
Meta has released its first Quest headset in the year 2019.
Augmented Reality
Currently Meta is also focussing on wrist devices to control the planned AR glasses. There is an inbuilt camera in the second generation of the smart glasses of Meta set for its release this fall winter. Meta has released its first-gen in the year 2021 with Ray-Ban. The third generation will have a viewfinder to operate various functions like viewing incoming text messages, scanning QR codes and text translation is planned to be launched in 2025. The VP of AR in Meta Alex Himel claimed that the glasses are with a “neural interface band” that will enable users to control the glasses via hand movements.
People Engagement
There were setbacks during the metaverse adoption of the AR/VR headset segment. Last year sales were reported to decline by 2% year-on-year to $1.1 billion in December 2022. As a cost cutting measure the company has laid off its 11000 employees in the month of November.
Mark Rabkin admitted the problem and claimed that the company is struggling to “keep new users engaged” and the engagement of the new users is missing compared to the old ones. This can pose a danger to the Meta’s planned hardware devices.
Most of the releases are set for two to four years down the line Meta is focused with their AR/VR goals.