Meta's CTO says he could build a Vision Pro, but he won't
The batteries in the Quest 2 controllers last long, very long. And that's what Meta wants to achieve with the Touch Plus controllers as well.
The Touch Plus controllers that come with Meta Quest 3 do not have tracking rings. There are still tracking LEDs in the controllers, but they are in places where they could be occluded during use. The resulting tracking gaps, Meta explained, are filled by the simultaneous hand tracking, so there should be no tracking loss.
The tracking quality should not be affected, but we'll reveal how good the tracking really is in direct comparison to Meta Quest 2 in our upcoming Quest 3 review.
But what about the battery life of the Touch Plus controllers? After all, they feature the enhanced TruTouch haptics for more tactile and realistic feedback. Will they last as long as the Quest 2 controllers? Here's what Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said during his last Q&A session on Instagram:
"I know the Quest 2 controller's battery life was legendary. And we're really trying to hold ourselves to those same high standards for Quest 3," Bosworth said.
Of course, if you want to avoid charging problems, you can buy the official charging dock, but at $130, it is quite expensive.
Bosworth on Vision Pro: "A stunning device, but..."
Bosworth touched on a number of other topics. He said that his team is working hard to make Horizon Worlds available in more countries, shared his thoughts on Vision Pro, and said that Meta is looking up to 20 years into the future when developing hardware.
Below are the verbatim responses, slightly edited for clarity.
When will Meta Horizon Worlds be available worldwide?
AB: I really want Meta Horizon Worlds to be available to as many people as possible. I'm very excited about that. In fact, I push my team on it every week, however it isn't just as simple as turning it on. Things like localization, adaptation, compliance with local laws. These are really important things, especially for a company of our size. So it's something that we are actively working on. I don't have anything to announce right now. But stay tuned, because this is an active area of work for us.
Thoughts on Vision Pro vs. Quest 3, apart from price?
AB: It's really hard to separate price from performance. What I've said to many journalists today, I'll say here as well is the Vision Pro is a great device, stunning device.
I can build that device. For $3,500, I can build that device. I don't want to. We've never even considered that seriously here. It's not a price point that gets this technology in the hands of people. You can put your innovation in lots of different directions. We put ours into features and also making those features accessible. I'm proud of that and stand on it. So it's really hard to do a critique apart from price.
You're not gonna find a better value headset, a better quality headset [than Quest 3]. Not just for the dollar, but in general in the market than ours because we're gonna have a developer community. The developers are building for us because that's where the people are.
How far ahead does Meta look VR Hardware wise?
It's really far. Certainly we have a view, shoot, in our research organization, maybe 10,15 20 years down the line. What could displays look like? What could inputs look like? What kind of disruptive technologies could exist? Can we invest in them? Can we make them happen faster?
That being said, we probably have maybe, at any given time, three or four different headsets in development. And those are looking more like two to five years in the future. So you kind of have to have a distant and a near mode when you're developing hardware.
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