Meta's CTO on why we are still waiting for Quest 3's Augments feature
Meta's CTO explains why the promised Augments feature for Quest 3 is taking longer than expected.
In his recent AMA on Instagram, Bosworth said about Augments:
"We were playing with it in January. And we decided it wasn't good enough. It was too held back by some system architecture limitations that we had and feeling more like a toy and it didn't really have the power that we think it needed to deliver on the promise of what it was.
And so we made a tough decision there to go back to the drawing board, and basically consider a completely different type of architecture, starting from scratch, basically, including actually a much deeper set of changes to the system to enable what we want to build there. So I think we made the right call. We're not going to ship things we're not excited about, but it did restart the clock. And so this is going to take longer than we had hoped to deliver."
According to an Androidcentral article from April, Meta is targeting the fall as the launch date for the feature. However, the timeline may have changed since then. Meta said at Connect that Augments will arrive sometime in 2024.
No Meta Quest Gaming Showcase this year
Bosworth also hinted that there will be no Meta Quest Gaming Showcase this year, and seemingly teased "big launches" for the fall, presumably referring to the unannounced Meta Quest 3S. The previous showcases were held in 2021, 2022 and 2023, the three years following the release of Meta Quest 2.
"Love your enthusiasm for the Gaming Showcase. We love that event as well. We don't do it every year. We kind of do it when, you know, we have the cycles honestly. And in years that we have big launches and things going on, we often don't, we put that energy into other places. So we got a big fall coming up. We're excited about Connect."
Another interesting comment concerned the passthrough improvements that system update v66 brought, with Bosworth saying that the team had been working on it for a long time and that the improvement was not a reaction to competitors. What made it possible was the "real-world data" that the team got access to after the launch of the Quest.
Lastly, Bosworth said that at a certain point, you can expect Meta to roll out AI for Quest headsets, but this will require separate AI training as Quest sees the world differently to the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses.
You can watch the AMA on Instagram, if still available.
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