Carmack says that Meta is selling its hardware for cost, so third parties will need to charge more than Quest. Carmack is a proponent of lower-cost headsets to make the VR industry more accessible. While he says Meta’s strategy will enable “boutique” headsets that push areas like resolution, field of view, or comfort, he suggests this “brings with it a tension” that Meta will no longer have the “shine of making industry leading high-end gear”, which he suggests will force Meta to focus on “novel new hardware systems from the research pipeline for their high end systems, which is going to lead to poor decisions”.
“VR is held back more by software than hardware”
But Carmack’s biggest criticism of the idea is from a software perspective. Carmack claims that the new strategy is “a drag” on Meta software development because it will take away the attention of Meta’s top software engineers who could be better spent “improving the system”. This is vital, in his words, because “VR is held back more by software than hardware”.Horizon OSCarmack finished his statement by suggesting “allowing partner access to the full OS build for standard Quest hardware” instead, which he claims could be done very cheaply and enable specialty applications and location-based entertainment, though he acknowledges it would be “a much lower key announcement”.potentially LG tooHere’s Carmack’s full statement
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Meta Horizon OS Will Run On Headsets From ASUS & Lenovo
Meta is rebranding its Quest software platform to Meta Horizon OS and opening it up to third-party headset makers, including ASUS and Lenovo.
“Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost, and just ignores the development costs, so don’t expect this to result in cheaper VR headsets from other companies with Quest equivalent capabilities. Carmack’s full statement
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“Meta already sells the Quest systems basically at production cost, and ignores development costs. So don’t expect this to result in cheaper VR headsets from other companies with equivalent capabilities. You can push for resolution, field of vision, and comfort. Quest’s silicon could be used to drive Apple displays. You could create a headset that would fit people who have unusually wide IPDs or face/head shapes. Add crazy cooling systems, and you could overclock all of it. The price would be higher, and the app compatibility was also included. This would be fantastic! Meta will have to make poor decisions if they cede those simple scaling axes to headset developers. Meta will suffer from this initiative. Unquestionably. It is tempting to think that this will just be a matter of increasing the budget, but in reality it’s not the case. Sharing the system with other partners does not work as expected. It’s not something that you can factor out. “