With four headsets planned to be launched in two years, will Meta's metaverse road be flatter?

Recently, major media in the industry have reported on Meta(formerly Facebook)'s next headset release plan. According to the roadmap of internal outflows, Meta will release four VR headsets in the next two years, of which the Quest series will occupy two seats.

In the eyes of overseas professional media, the code name of the new Quest headset has been identified as Stinson and Cardiff , two place names from California. Like Apple, Meta has been using place names to represent products since 2014. For example, many early VR players loved the Oculus Rift DK2 codenamed Crystal Cove, while the original Quest headset was codenamed Monterey (the same name as Apple's latest version of MacOS).

In 2021, Sina VR reported that Meta was secretly developing a high-end headset: Project Cambria. For this product, Zuckerberg has said that it will be more suitable for remote work scenarios than simple pan-entertainment products. After a few months, some media claimed that the price of this headset was $799 or higher, but Meta officials quickly refuted the rumors after learning about it, and said that Cambria's price would significantly exceed $799.

Let's go back to the roadmap above. Specifically, the plan is the second version of the cambria code-named Funston that completes the planning of these four headsets and will be released in 2024.

To sum up, Meta will release two new Quest series headsets and two more high-end Cambria series headsets over the next two years. However, as with the advent of many blockbuster products, the exact release date is likely to change. After all, the current industry is still filled with the haze of chip shortage, and the shutdown and supply chain problems caused by the epidemic will also largely reflect the emergence of new products.

1. About the next two generations of Quest headsets

As a popular product in the past two years, the achievements of Quest1 and Quest2 are beyond doubt, especially the latter has become a familiar internet celebrity product for most VR players. And for their successors, the outside world is also full of curiosity and speculation. In March 2021, Zuckerberg said in an interview with foreign media that Meta has been developing future generations of VR headsets, and described the overview of Quest3 and Quest4.

For now, we can't make predictions about the specifications of the upcoming Stinson and Cardiff, or even determine if they're the Quset3 and Quest4 zuckerberg mentioned last year. Although the previous two products have followed the digital numbering scheme, the upcoming new products may not have a significant generational upgrade, because they may only carry the mid-term update of the product life cycle, or even only partial upgrades (core links).

Of course, on this basis, no one can make a prediction of its quotation.

2. About visual and facial tracking

As a product that was once regarded as the Pro version of Quest, Cambria's hardware improvement is what many people are concerned about. Among them, a variety of fashionable tracking functions are the focus of people's attention. Previously, Zuckerberg had said that the company's goal was to officially launch cambria's first generation of products in 2022. Judging from the news from the industry chain, visual tracking and facial tracking have been determined to appear in new devices.

In addition, in view of the ultra-high cost performance of the Quest series of standalone headsets, especially the price of $299, which greatly reduces the purchase cost, many people are also full of expectations for the price of new equipment. But for Meta, how to make an independent headset equipped with two major tracking technologies affordable to everyone is indeed not a small difficulty, which is a very serious challenge for the two major departments of finance and technology.

Previously, some leaked Cambria photos showed that the headset's controller (handle) would abandon the traditional tracking system and replace it with the controller's built-in tracking camera. The benefits are also obvious: it reduces the tracking burden on the headset and allows the handle to use infrared to achieve more accurate tracking.

3. A little official news

In Meta's just-held 2022 first quarter earnings call, Zuckerberg told investors that the company will disclose more details of Project Cambria in the coming months as the product's launch date is getting closer. In addition, Cambria's position will never replace the existing Quest2, because the life cycle of Meta's design for this classic product will not end for a long time.

In addition, Meta has also revealed to foreign media that it will ship its first AR device in 2024: Nazare, and launch its follow-up second- and third-generation products in 2026 and 2028.

4. About Nazare

A former Meta employee who has worked on the Nazare project said that Zuckerberg's expectations for AR glasses are extremely high, even no less than the VR headset and the meta-universe project itself. In the mind of the young Internet leader, AR glasses will become a new era created by Meta, no less important than Apple's release of the iPhone.

Specifically, Zuckerberg insisted that the first version of Nazare offer a full AR experience, including 3D graphics, large views, and an easy-to-market look. On this basis, the design team initially hoped that it would have a 70-degree view, which is much wider than the products currently on the market, but it will most likely not be achieved. In addition, judging from the news flowing out from within Meta, Nazare currently weighs 100 grams, which is about four times that of a normal pair of glasses.

But despite spending billions of dollars on AR glasses, Sales expectations for the first device within Meta are not high: just a few tens of thousands. In addition, the first version of the product will be aimed at early adopters and developers. For now, while its price point hasn't been decided, it's certainly more expensive than the $299 Quest VR headset.

The various costs of AR glasses may be higher than VR headsets. From the existing products and roadmap, a mature AR glasses alone cost thousands of dollars. And this is also largely another test of Zuckerberg's determination: whether to follow the subsidy policy of the Quest series of headsets, so as to strengthen their competitiveness while greatly weakening the profit margins of competitors such as Apple.

5. Our views

While Meta has great hopes for AR (and so does Apple), the industry has always had questions about whether people will embrace AR glasses in the coming years. For now, including Microsoft, Snap and other companies, their main AR products are far from mainstream. And this situation is undoubtedly the most risky for Meta that openly bets on the metacosm.

It is understood that Meta's related departments involved in the metacosm have swelled to about 18,000 people, spending the company $10 billion last year alone. In order to make AR glasses and future VR hardware, Meta also poached people from Microsoft, Apple, Google and other companies, thus directly driving up the price of talent across the industry. Of course, the biggest price to pay is Meta itself.

Also, Meta's stock has taken a hit as its social media business slows and younger users flock to competitors like TikTok. At the same time, its antitrust review in the United States has largely announced the failure of several large acquisitions by the company, such as the big acquisition of the century for Instagram and WhatsApp.

What's more, after undermining Meta's core advertising business through recent tracking changes in iOS, Apple is also preparing to launch an attack on Zuckerberg's hardware strategy, and the real giant of the tech industry will launch high-end MR headsets as soon as this year, and eventually launch its own AR glasses.

Based on the above dilemma, we believe that although Zuckerberg has announced its determination to enter the metaverse to the world, it will take a long time for Meta's VR/AR devices to become truly mainstream. Although the Quest series of devices has achieved initial success, the characteristics and strength of competitors cannot be resisted by low-price policies.

As a former Meta employee put it, Zuckerberg's desire to succeed in the metaverse could take decades.