Facebook is already working on Oculus Quest 3 and 4. The company's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has revealed despite the Oculus 2 headset - which has already received rave reviews - dropping near the end of 2020, the firm is working had on its successors.
He told The Information:
"Because of how hardware gets developed, you kind of need to know what your next three products are going to look like all at the same time. It’s not like software where we’re changing it every couple of weeks. We have product teams spun up now working on the next few generations of virtual reality and what Quest 3 and 4 are gonna look like."
Zuckerberg also weighed in on what he sees as the most important developments needed for the next Oculus Quest devices.
He added:
"Getting eye-tracking and face-tracking in. If you’re really excited about social presence you want to make sure the device has all the sensors to really kind of animate realistic avatars so you can communicate well."
The Facebook team is focused on making social interactions in virtual reality appear more natural and lifelike as people spend more time together in digital spaces.
However, he noted:
"On the VR side, I think the biggest things that we’re very focused on now are: how do you pack more sensors, to create a better social experience, into the device? To run each sensor requires more CPU power and that generates more heat and creates all these different issues.
When I think about where you’re at with VR today, there’s some pretty great games & different experiences but I’d love to get to the point where you have realistic avatars of yourself, and where you can make real authentic eye contact with someone and have real expressions that get reflected on your avatar.
So what do you need for that? Well you need to be able to do eye tracking to do eye contact. You need to have some sense of face tracking or sense of what’s going on with the person’s expressions in order to be able to have those emotions come through naturally."
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