I knew I shoulda bought my holiday gifts this past weekend! It’s official. Meta confirmed that it’s raising the price of its Quest 2 VR headset by 33%, from $299 to $399. To placate the (understandably) incensed buyers, it’s including a free copy of Beat Saber, a $30 game with in-app purchases. Meta claims rising costs forced its hand, and to be fair, even at
$399 it’s still got the biggest bang for the VR buck. But, once again, timing is everything. Some critics feel it was a desperate move for Meta to show some good financial news; others feel that when you’re growing a nascent market it’s not a good tactic to hit them with a price increase.
At $299, the Quest 2 was the VR equivalent of buying a cheap printer and then spending oodles of money on ink cartridges. It was supposed to get everyone all tooled up for VR.
Now, at the same time as Meta’s increasing the cost to enter VR, the chatter is all about a new generation of headsets and glasses that may prove that people would rather be in XR (extended reality, a combination of physical and virtual worlds). While completely immersive VR might be good for gaming and entertainment, XR makes a lot more sense in the enterprise
where you really need to remain conscious of your real-world surroundings. Virtual reality statistics show that 27% of VR industry experts say that user experience such as technical glitches and
bulky hardware is a huge challenge in the growth of VR and its mass adoption.
The holy grail for XR is to make devices equally suited to factory floors, strolling through town, and gaming. One of the most important features in this class of headsets is pass-through video. Pass-through allows you to step outside your view in immersive VR to see a real-time view of your surroundings. If you’re a Quest user, you’ll notice that it uses
pass-through video (in grainy black and white) to help you set up your set up your guardian boundary, so you don’t knock into furniture while you’re playing. Next-gen devices will also offer higher resolution pass-through, hands-free usage (be it hands, fingers, or voice), wider angle displays, and brighter images. But, they will be more expensive.
Extended reality is an umbrella term for a continuum of experiences. As I write, Meta is looking at an enterprise solution with its new XR product dubbed Cambria. Cambria includes a pass-through camera for AR, face and eye tracking, and other enhancements in addition to Oculus-type VR . It’ll likely be more expensive than the Quest (over $800). Microsoft HoloLens 2 is already based on XR technology. That’s why you can play a game in VR while still seeing the real room you’re in. (HoloLens 2 starts at over $3,000.) Varjo is another good example of an XR headset ($2,500) promising resolution equivalent to the human eye. And the VR subsidiary of TikTok is planning to launch a price-sensitive headset called the Pico 4 VR-Pro.
Apple’s designs for its new headsets are starting to leak. Expect a sleeker, more fashionable design and multiple 3D-sensing modules for detecting hand gestures and recognizing objects in the vicinity of the wearer. It will also (according to publications like MacRumor) support voice control, skin detection, spatial detection, expression detection, and spatial audio. Interestingly, one of the patents filed is for finger cuffs—replacing hand controllers, not landing you in jail. It’s reported to even have its own operating system built specifically for XR. I’m
sure it will be expensive and guessing the company has fingers crossed for the return of those “lines around the block” days of the iPhone.
HTC announced Vive Flow, a lighter-weight design resembling a heavy pair of sunglasses. It’ll be lighter, higher resolution, and optimized for mixed reality and metaverse experiences ($500). Google announced the second coming of Google Glass for AR and is thought to be releasing its VR headset, while SONY’s about to launch Playstation VR2. It’ll work exclusively with the PS5, which means the serious gamer audience. |