The Oculus Quest 2 may be our pick for the best VR headsets you can buy right now, but the Oculus Quest 3 seems to be bringing some serious improvements.
In an interview with The Information (denoted by UploadVR), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how the next Oculus Quest might include face and eye tracking to give users a more realistic presence in a virtual environment. Zuckerberg also basically confirmed that there would be an Oculus Quest 4 in the not too distant future.
“Because of the way hardware is developed, you need to know what your next three products will look like at the same time,” Zuckerberg said. “We have product teams who are now working on the next generations of virtual reality and know what Quest 3 and 4 will look like.”
Whet your appetite to find out where to buy the Oculus Quest 2. It is no surprise that Facebook would benefit from the success of its VR headset and plan future generations.
While the Quest 2 is great for VR experiences and gaming, more work seems to be needed to make it a platform for a truly compiled virtual presence. And one way to do that could be through eye and face tracking, according to Zuckerberg. It would be better to capture a person’s expressions and translate them into a virtual avatar to give them a more realistic presence in a virtual environment.
“One of the things I’m really looking forward to in future releases is eye tracking and face tracking. If you’re really into social presence, you want to make sure the device has all the sensors to really realistically animate avatars so you can communicate well, “explained Zuckerberg.
The social lighting fixture further explained that this poses technical challenges given the number of sensors that would be needed in a VR headset. It should be remembered that both Oculus Quest and Quest 2 are all-in-one systems, i.e. they have no external sensors and relatively limited computing power. More advanced tracking is generally the domain of expensive VR headsets plugged into a powerful PC like the Valve Index.
“On the VR side, I think the biggest things that we’re really focusing on right now are: How do you put more sensors into the device to create a better social experience? Each sensor requires more CPU to run, which creates more heat and causes all of these different problems, ”Zuckerberg said.
He went on to note that better face and eye tracking will result in more realistic avatars. Facebook already has avatars on its main platform – check out our guide on creating your own Facebook avatar guide – but they have a very cartoonish aesthetic.
How quickly Facebook will develop a next-generation Oculus Quest is not clear. However, this gives us a taste of what to expect from the next Quest headset, and that’s pretty promising.
Today’s Best Oculus Quest 2 Deals
Comments are closed.