A new leak this evening has revealed Meta’s upcoming roadmap for VR/MR headsets and AR glasses, with 2025 being a big year.
Meta smart glasses
According to The Verge, Meta’s Reality Labs division on Tuesday hosted an internal presentation detailing upcoming hardware. On the smart glasses front, this fall will see second-generation Ray-Ban Stories, which are sunglasses with a camera and microphone.
In 2025 (previously a year earlier), third-generation smart glasses will feature a “viewfinder” display to show incoming messages, translate text in real-time, and scan QR codes. Control will be through a “neural interface” band that, according to The Verge, “allows the wearer to control the glasses through hand movements, such as swiping fingers on an imaginary D-pad.”
Eventually, he said the band will let the wearer use a virtual keyboard and type at the same words per minute as what mobile phones allow.
This neural interface technology from CTRL-Labs (brain-computer interface technology) will also be available on a smartwatch that can be paired with the glasses. Last year, Meta canceled a watch with a detachable frame and camera that was almost GoPro-like in nature.
Glasses that feature AR capabilities that can “project high-quality holograms of avatars onto the real world” are coming in 2027 with a second-gen smartwatch.
Meta MR headsets
In the near term, a Quest 3 that is more expensive than the current $399 model is coming this year. It will be two times thinner, “at least twice as powerful,” and have front-facing cameras. It will offer mixed-reality experiences thanks to pass-through capabilities and 41 new apps/games.
Next year might see a more affordable headset called Ventura, while an advanced “La Jolla” headset is coming after that.
Looking at the landscape, Google is rumored to be working on a mixed reality headset, dubbed “Project Iris,” for 2024. However, the more immediate development is the partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm. The latter will provide the chip for a Samsung XR device (the form factor is currently unknown) that will be powered by an optimized version of Android.
Meanwhile, Google’s AR work has been split between the Android and hardware divisions in an arrangement that mimics Pixel phone and Watch development.
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