Well, I was going to write my next blogpost about how I am using Claude AI and Undermind to research my OER textbook on the metaverse, but then I lay down on the sofa and pulled up Google News on my trusty iPad, only to see much hullabaloo about Meta’s new lightweight VR glasses, so I guess I’m gonna be talking about that today:
Now, before I say anything else, I am going to preface this by saying that, when it comes to Meta and their line of virtual reality headsets, I am sorely conflicted. The hardware (particularly the Meta Quest 3) is amazing for the price. It’s the surveillance capitalism that underlying this amazing hardware that’s the problem.
It’s enough money that Mark Zuckerberg can afford to drop billions of dollars on what ultimately became the utter failure of social VR platforms Horizon Worlds, and Horizon Workrooms. Proof positive that deep pockets and executive fiat cannot force the populace to accept something that looked and felt like it was constructed by handsomely-compensated engineers being directed by even-more-handsomely-compensated executive committees. Horizon Worlds (which still limps along on a last-minute reprieve, although it is on life support), and Horizon Workrooms (the dog which Meta thankfully took out behind the shed and shot earlier this year) somehow managed to be both dreadfully cartoonish and utterly soulless at the same time.
Meta lost me back in the days when they bought out Oculus, and then insisted that users of Oculus VR headsets (I owned an Oculus Rift at the time) had to get a Facebook account in order to continue use the devices. I responded by binning my Rift and switching to a Valve Index (which I use at home) and a Vive Pro 2 (which currently sits collecting dust at work while I am on my research and study leave). Frankly, I don’t use PCVR (i.e. a tethered VR headset attached to a high-end gaming PC) nearly as much as I used to.
Partly it’s because I am still enamoured with my Apple Vision Pro, and partly it’s because I finally understand something fundamental about the first generation of social VR: nobody wants to wear something on their face. Both Philip Rosedale (High Fidelity, now long shuttered) and Linden Lab (Sansar, miraculously still limping along after being sold) bet the farm that hundreds of thousands of people would take up PCVR and visit their metaverse platforms—a bet which they lost, badly.
Which brings me back to Meta and their announcement of lightweight virtual reality glasses, which apparently was announced this evening, while I was engaged in research-related chatter with Claude and Undermind:
The link in this video for the product called simply Meta VR Glasses takes you to the following page, where you can sign up if you really want to be spammed to death because you didn’t bother to read Meta’s eye-wateringly detailed 5,474-word Terms of Service and their 6,611-word Privacy Policy, before blithely agreeing to part with your name and email address:
How do I know this? Well, Meta smartly won’t let you paste those two web pages into a word counter website (something I am sure many commenters have tried before me!):
But they can’t stop me from cutting and pasting the entire text into Microsoft Word, and getting a word count from there:
Most people, rather than dig through approximately 12,000 words of legalese, would simply shrug and let Meta monitor them. I’m not going to bother (and I’m quite aware that, even though I haven’t touched Facebook in many years, they still have some sort of profile on me anyways). But I’m damned if I’m going to deliberately add to that treasure trove of data points, sliced and diced and sold to the highest bidder.
Meta (formerly known as Facebook) is already in deep, deep trouble with various countries over deliberately making its products addictive to both children and adults. And that colours how I look at whatever hardware Meta is trumpeting. But hey, let’s take a quick look at it anyways. I am only going to cite one source in this blogpost; I will probably come back ’round and write more later.
David Heaney of UploadVR reports:
Meta VR Glasses were just officially announced. Priced at $1300*, they have 2.4K micro-OLED displays, weigh 100 grams, and are powered by a tethered puck with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Reality Elite chipset.
The puck runs the same operating system as Quest 3, and supports all the same content, rendered at notably higher resolution thanks to a combination of the more powerful chipset (essentially an XR2 Gen 3 by a different name) and eye-tracked foveated rendering. It features 12GB of RAM and 128GB of storage, and there’s a microSD slot in the puck to expand it.
Foveated rendering is essentially this: the headset tracks where your eyes are looking and puts more pixels there, while pulling them away from where you’re not looking. It’s a bit of sleight of hand.
Also, that 100-gram weight is probably just the glasses themselves, which are doing what Apple did with the Apple Vision Pro, and diverting a lot of the weight of this device via a cable snaking down to what they are calling a puck in your pants pocket (a puck? really?!?? how many rectangular pucks have you seen???).
David continues:
The stark difference between Meta VR Glasses and any Quest, however, is the split architecture, and the dramatic reduction in weight and bulk this enables.
Meta VR Glasses have no onboard computing, not even a tracking coprocessor, and thus entirely rely on the puck, which provides both power and data over a thin and flexible fiber optic cable.
The visor has an open-periphery design, so you naturally see the real world to your sides and below you. It’s built with a magnesium alloy that minimizes weight while also enabling a fanless, passively cooled design that weighs “around” 100 grams.
Even David is using quotation marks. As the British like to say, “There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,” and it will be interesting to see how closely they adhere to this promise (these glasses will not be shipping to consumers until spring of 2027).
The field of view of these glasses is also noticeably constrained (70° × 66°) compared to the Meta Quest 3 it replaces (110° × 96°). To compare, Claude AI tells me that “Apple has never published an official field of view for the Vision Pro, so all the numbers come from third-party measurements and optical modeling,” giving estimates of horizontal FOV as somewhere between 100-110°. While Apple hasn’t published any information themselves on the vertical FOV, two different sources cited by Claude give the varying figures of 77-90°, which shows you just how much these tech companies guard the details of their products! Which, of course, makes the VR YouTubers dig even harder!!
But I digress. David finishes his report by stating:
Meta VR Glasses will also feature the first implementation of Hologram, the company’s productization of its Codec Avatars research. Similar to Apple Vision Pro’s Personas, it will let you join flatscreen WhatsApp video calls as a photorealistic face-tracked avatar, and appear as a full-scale realistic avatar in calls with other Meta VR Glasses (and eventually Quest 3) owners.
However, at launch in spring, your spatial Hologram will be a “2.5D” stereoscopic video stream, at true scale but only seen as a front-angle view. Even if you change your perspective, the Hologram will stay as a head-on perspective, like billboarded assets in a video game. Meta says it plans to evolve Hologram over time post-launch to become a truly 6DoF 3D system, at which point it will become the default platform-level avatar experience for its VR platform, effectively superseding the cartoon Meta Avatars.
Frankly, three degrees of freedom and a “2.5D” spatial Meta Hologram do not sound anything like the continually-improving (and frankly, sometimes unnerving quality) of Personas on the Apple Vision Pro. While chatting with people via the InSpaze app in my AVP, have often completely forgotten that I am not really looking at them, but instead at their scanned and animated Personas! Apple really has done a masterful job of capturing the high end of the VR market, just as Meta has captured the low end with its Meta Quest 1, 2, then 3 headsets (we don’t talk about the Meta Quest Pro 😉).
I will reserve final judgement on these new VR glasses until I have viewed a few of the aforementioned virtual reality YouTubers’ opinions on the device (and until they actually ship the damn thing). As far as I am concerned, Meta has shit the bed so badly in their lamentable history of past (and current!) user privacy issues surrounding their products, that I honestly don’t have the slightest inclination to even try these out. I’ll be hanging out in my Apple Vision Pro or my venerable Valve Index instead.
Sorry, Meta.
*U.S. dollars (which currently works out to $1,833 Canadian as of this evening:
