Meta CTO explains what Meta wants to achieve with Meta Horizon OS
The announcement of Meta Horizon OS made waves in the VR industry. CTO Andrew Bosworth explains the strategy behind Meta's latest move.
Meta announced on Monday that it will open up the Meta Quest OS (now called Meta Horizon OS) and license it to selected hardware partners to build their own headsets.
What is the strategy behind this, and what role will Meta Quest play in the future? CTO Andrew Bosworth answered these questions in his latest AMA on Instagram.
We've been designing headsets for a while now. And one thing that we've always known and talked about a lot is, it's a very tight trade space. So if you want to build a great headset for fitness, if you want to build a great headset for productivity, if you want to build a great headset for gaming, these require trade-offs, and how you design the optics displays, how you choose the sensors, how you do the ID, how you do weight distribution, and the further it is in one vector, the further away it is from another vector. We're going to continue to build what we think of as kind of the most general purpose device that we can. But that leaves a lot of room and opportunity, big markets, we think, for people who are willing to serve those dedicated communities who care a lot more about a specific combination of features.
Bosworth also says that Quest apps will run on all other devices based on Meta Horizon OS.
If you go back to Quest 1 launch, when I was onstage, I said we're not launching a device here, we're launching an ecosystem. And that is, we want to give developers the biggest audience we can so that they can build a business, and we want to give consumers the most developers we can so they can have great experiences. That's the two sets of marketplaces that we are trying to usher into the world. And we're expanding the footprint with Horizon OS for exactly that reason.
A good idea that needs to prove itself
In his Instagram announcement, Zuckerberg mentioned four use cases that Meta Horizon OS-powered headsets could specialize in: Productivity, Media Consumption, Gaming and Fitness.
The first three hardware partners to launch headsets are ASUS, Lenovo, and Xbox. The announcement came early, as it could be "a couple of years" before the devices are released, according to Zuckerberg.
The industry will need these years, as the market for specialized headsets is currently rather small, I argued in an editorial on Meta Horizon OS. Especially if they become pricier than Meta's Quest headsets, which they probably will.
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