Category: Virtual Reality (General)

Meta’s New Virtual Reality Glasses: Some First Thoughts

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:

You gotta hand it to Meta; they do know how to grab attention (and they have deep enough pockets from vacuuming up and selling every shred of personal data of its 3 billion users to pay for this news media onslaught!) CEO Mark Zuckerberg probably found the money in his couch cushions. 😉

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 teaser video for Meta VR Glasses (coming soon!)

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:

Meta’s Terms of Service document (approsimately 5,500 words)
Meta’s Privacy Policy (weighing in at over 6,500 words) might just be heavier than its new VR glasses 😂

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!!

When prompted, Claude AI gives two rather different figures for the Apple Vision Pro’s vertical field of view.

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.

Image source: UploadVR (no doubt via Meta).

*U.S. dollars (which currently works out to $1,833 Canadian as of this evening):

And you can bet that this price will not include all the necessary little extras.

On Pause

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Please note: none of this blogpost was written or edited using GenAI; this is me, Ryan Schultz—and yes, as a matter of fact, I do use em-dashes (see what I just did there? 😉).

You might have noticed a dearth of content on my blog lately.

Due to both personal and professional obligations, I regret that I will be unable to write my blog for the next little while. It’s not due to any shortage of news; in fact, I have had a couple of people reach out, specifically to ask me to comment on Rec Room shutting down, for example. Or that once-mighty Fortnite is losing money. The hardware and software companies powering immersive experiences in general appear to be going through what the Gartner consulting group has politely termed the “trough of disillusionment.”

But, unfortunately, at the moment, I simply don’t have the time, nor the energy, to devote to documenting the latest events happening in what is clearly a “metaverse winter” (or, perhaps even more harshly, a “virtual reality winter,” as many companies do appear to be stalling or even abandoning further iterations on their virtual/augmented reality headsets and associated gear, in an all-out corporate stampede towards more-wearable, but still less-functional, glasses).

Once July 1st, 2026 hits, and I can finally start my Research and Study Leave from the University of Manitoba, I hope to be able to pause, catch my breath, and survey the current landscape as I research and write my Open Educational Resource on the metaverse. The timing seems very auspicious to me. There’s definitely a change in the air, and perhaps I will be lucky enough to be able to document this pivotal moment properly.

But not today, and not for a little while yet. Thank you for your patience while I have to deal with what is in front of me at the moment.

Yet Another One Bites the Dust: Meta’s Shutdown of Horizon Workrooms

In a recent blogpost about the shutdown of MeetinVR, I wrote:

Facebook (which had gone to all the trouble and expense of rebranding as Meta during this ridiculous hype cycle) has dropped literally hundreds of millions of dollars into acquiring Oculus and trying to build a business metaverse platform, and failed to even to entice its own employees into using it (let alone anybody else)…

I predict that we are going to see a “metaverse winter,” much like the previous “AI winters,” when the initial promise and hype of the technology hits what the Gartner Group politely calls “the trough of disillusionment.” And I predict we are going to see a lot more shutdown announcements like this throughout 2026.

Well, guess what? Once again, I am late in reporting this, but Meta has finally shut down its Horizons Workrooms product, a social VR platform intended for business use. According to a Road to VR news report by Scott Hayden, Horizon Workroom’s final day was Feb. 16th, 2026.

Scott Hayden’s article on the shuttering of Horizon Workrooms, Road to VR, Jan. 16th, 2026

This is hardly a surprise. As I said up top, I don’t think anybody was using Workrooms. I wrote about the launch of the open beta of Workrooms in August 2021, at a time when Facebook Horizon (as it was then called) was still in closed, invitation-only beta. One neat feature is that it allowed you to bring your physical keyboard into the virtual space via keyboard tracking (this only worked for certain models of keyboard, though). One month later, they announced a collaboration with Zoom, but I don’t know if that went anywhere.

By October 2022, rumours were rumbling, with leaks from internal memos stating that even Meta’s own employees were avoiding the use of Workrooms. Shortly thereafter, The Verge issued a savagely critical evaluation of Workrooms. The product was buggy, the avatars were cartoony, and compared to simpler solutions like Zoom and Microsoft Teams, there just seemed to be too high a cost to entry for its designated use case. Meta finally decided this year to take the ailing dog out back and shoot it. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Scott Hayden reported:

For existing users, Meta has not announced a direct replacement for Workrooms; the company suggests users look into third-party apps such as Arthur, Microsoft Teams Immersive and Zoom Workplace.

Oh, and Meta has also been shelving projects, and laying off staff in its Reality Labs division, according to Scott’s article and CNBC. So it would appear that our metaverse winter is now in full swing.

Photo by Bob Canning on Unsplash

But keep in mind that winter is only one season out of four. And winter has its own special beauty, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s very much going on under all that ice and snow.

Yes, we are probably going to see more platforms shut down, like Workrooms, and more companies go out of business (not Meta of course, smaller ones). But those of us who have already been active in the metaverse for many years aren’t going anywhere during these lean, cold times. We’ve found our people, our communities, wherever we happen to meet up, whether it’s a flatscreen virtual world like Second Life or a meetup in social VR like VRChat. We hop from world to world as needed.

Yes, the current marketplace struggles will still impact us all in some way. We can expect moments of panic and chaos (e.g. when Ready Player Me was bought out by Netflix, and thousands of developers had to scramble to replace their avatar systems). But we will hunker down, use the downtime productively, and wait for the next season to arrive.

My Notes from an XRHQ Live Streaming Event on LinkedIn and YouTube — Pixels & Pills: Breaking Research on Immersive Treatment for Mental Health, using the Apple Vision Pro and Explore POV (January 29th, 2026)

PLEASE NOTE: This is now a somewhat edited first draft of the notes I was frantically taking during this livestream, because I wanted to get the information out there on this very interesting application of the Apple Vision Pro! Yesterday I came across this announcement of how the Apple Vision Pro was being used in research to determine its effectiveness as a support for those suffering from anxiety and depression. As an avid AVP user, as a subscriber to Explore POV, and as a mental health consumer, I was definitely not going to miss this presentation, which was being streamed on LinkedIn (a first for me; usually I am on Microsoft Teams or Zoom for this sort of online event).

I was originally thinking I would go in using my AVP’s Virtual Display feature with my MacBook Pro (my usual work setup lately, what with my neck and shoulder pain), and then I thought: naaah, let’s not overcomplicate things. Apparently, this is also being streamed to YouTube, which I will look for later. UPDATE: Added the YouTube link at the end.

Any omissions and errors are my fault; sorry guys, I can only take notes so quickly!

The speakers in the livestream were:

Hala Darwish, Associate Professor, School of Nursing/Neurology/Neuroscience Graduate Program, University of Michigan (currently conducting research, still in its very earliest stages)

Jeremy Dalton, XRHQ (moderator of the event; formerly PwC Head of Immersive Technologies)

James Hustler, Explore POV (3D video creator, whose app was chosen as the Apple Vision Pro App of the Year 2025, https://exploreimmersive.com)

Event description: By immersing patients in breathtaking natural environments using the Apple Vision Pro, research is now underway to discover whether these experiences can support those suffering from anxiety and depression. Join James Hustler, creator of the award-winning Explore POV app, and Dr. Hala Darwish, Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, for a live discussion hosted by Jeremy Dalton from XRHQ. Together, we will explore the technology, the clinical thinking that inspired it, and what it could mean for the future of digital therapeutics.

(Unfortunately, I missed the first few minutes while I was fiddling with my sound settings, and trying to get my earbuds to work properly, so I missed Jeremy’s and Hala’s introductions.)

James Hustler travels the world to record amazing 3D videos and share them via his subscription service, Explore POV (which I have written about before here). He had been living in a motor home in New Zealand during the pandemic, when he had started recording 3D videos to share with friends.

Hala is in early stage research, interested in the relationship between mental health and the environment. Many people do not have access to certain environments (e.g. an urban environment with very little nature). Also, people can have access issues (e.g. a disability). Hala was looked into VR as an alternative to real-life nature experiences, and in 2019 when she started, the tech wasn’t quite ready (they tried with 360-degree videos, and she felt it didn’t really work well, i.e. low resolution; caused motion sickness, etc.). She then tried computer-generated nature graphics for patients with MS (multiple sclerosis). In 2023, the Apple Vision Pro was released, and Hala had a demo. The decision was made to switch from 360-degree VR video to 180-degree VR video.

James: The VR 360-degree video format is not new, but until recently, it hasn’t been at a high-enough resolution to create a true sense of presence. i.e., it changes from an intellectual response to an emotional response of being there. Explore POV is now recording at 16K resolution, and experimenting with Apple Immersive Video. The goal is to capture a scene so that the user feels like it’s lifelike and real to them.

Hala: transporting the individual to these natural environments does appear to have health benefits (mental and physical health, stress relief, etc.). In addition to anxiety and depression relief, Hala’s area of research, VR is also being used for the treatments of phobias (exposure therapy), performance anxiety (e.g. fear of public speaking), and as a method of pain management and distraction, among other uses.

James, when asked about feedback to his videos: Explore POV was created as a travel app, but people by the hundreds are contacting him about the mental and emotional response to the VR video scenes, telling him it’s the first time they’ve climbed a mountain or paddled a kayak. People have told James that they use the Explore POV app to relax after a stressful day’s work. This sort of feedback has opened James’ eyes to the possibilities of 3D video in VR. He had originally approached his work from a technical challenge (e.g. how do I create the highest-resolution 3D videos in VR?). He stressed that all these responses are anecdotal, but that we need scientific evidence.

Hala, in talking about her research: we want to run clinical trials (but we are currently testing feasibility and safety with a limited number of patients with progressive multiple sclerosis and depression). If we give AVPs to patients to use at home (e.g. with disability), how are they going to be able to use the headsets? The first study splits the patients into three groups. It’s a cross-over study: one group gets standard treatments first, then VR treatment, the second group gets VR treatment first, then standard treatments. The third group has just standard treatments, with no VR intervention. It is an early-stage feasibility study, with 14, 14, and 12 patients in the three categories of patients being looked at. She is also interested in researching longer-term responses to VR treatment.

Hala: in my opinion, exposure to natural scenes in VR appears to be a good adjunct to standard therapy. It’s still too early to come to any definitive conclusion. We first want to see if it has an impact on stress and anxiety levels, and then eventually expand to a larger number of patients (right now it’s a small number).

Which environments create greater impacts? James: we would expect to see what we’ve seen compared to previous academic research studies using real-life nature scenes (e.g. MRI brain scans after exposure to nature, e.g. taking a hike). There is already a good body of academic literature dealing with the impact of real-life nature on people’s anxiety and depression.

But we don’t have anything beyond anecdotal results for the use of nature in VR so far, nothing scientific; this research is still in its very earliest stages. For example, one early patient had a very good response to a desert environment (but it’s only a sample size of one!). James: if we’re aiming for calmness, certain VR video environments would probably help with that, e.g. flowing water, watching a sunset while sitting on a mountain, etc.). But again, at this point it’s purely anecdotal.

I asked a question in the text chat during the livestream that was actually asked of James, the creator of Explore POV, which was: Has James created specific VR video environments for Hala’s research? The answer was no; James has not yet created specific VR video environments for Hala’s research. However, they’ve now shot approximately 200 videos in 20 different countries so far for the Explore POV app (I think he said 200, but it was hard to take accurate notes!). He notes that they are a small, nimble team who can rapidly adjust to meet any requests from Hala’s research team, if needed in the future.

My question got asked!!

In response to a question from another user about the use of Apple’s SharePlay feature, where you can share an experience together with other Apple users via their Personas: James would love to add this feature, if he can. Yes, he would love to make Explore POV more of a multiplayer experience, if possible. He talks about people sequentially experiencing the same VR video in Explore POV, and thereby “sharing” the experience with others (e.g. a father and his daughter, if I remember correctly).

James: for people who can’t physically travel due to disability or for soke other reason, the technology is unlocking experiences that they might never experience otherwise. He thinks that it’s an amazing position to be in where we can give some of these people a taste of visiting remote places, with impacts in not just healthcare but also conservation, education, etc.

Hala: the academic research process is slow due to recruitment bottlenecks, but she estimates 2 years for the duration of the study (before results are published). he notes that most of the time, the people who most need the nature exposure do not have the opportunity to access it (for example they cannot afford an Apple Vision Pro).

(Unfortunately, Hala crashed out of the stream soon her comments, and the other two speakers wrapped it up!)

Conservation, education and healthcare are the three areas of what James wants to focus on with Explore Immersive. In addition to working with Hala on her research study, he’s also working on conservation and education applications as well. He hopes to start new partnerships in these three key areas, and wants to make Explore POV more than “just a travel app.”

Here’s the 53-minute YouTube video, in case you missed the livestream (unfortunately, you do have to actually go over and watch it on YouTube, as I am not allowed to embed it into my blogpost). Sorry! I do very strongly urge you to go over and watch it, though; it was amazing and inspiring.