You won't see it at CES 2022 but Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, is readying brand new versions of the Oculus Quest 2: an Oculus Quest Pro, and an Oculus Quest 3.
Both new Oculus headsets may be rebranded as Meta rather than Oculus, too, and Meta expects to sell tons of them: the Quest Pro, which is expected to launch by the summer, has a sales target of 3 million VR headsets in its first year.
With Apple's AR/VR headset expected to launch later this year too, 2022 is shaping up to be the battle of the best VR headsets.
A tale of two VR headsets
According to tech analyst Brad Lynch, as reported by Android Central, the two Oculus or Meta VR headsets will be rather different. The Oculus Pro, currently codenamed Cambria, will have miniLED displays; Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg recently spoke about "pancake optics" to deliver high resolutions without thick displays, so the Oculus Pro should be a treat for your eyes.
The Oculus Quest 3 is going for small OLED panels and could be the first headset to use uOLED, a more recent iteration of OLED technology; according to Lynch the headset will be launched at Meta Connect, which is likely to be in September 2022.
One of the most interesting things about Lynch's report is that he says Meta won't be using Snapdragon XR3 processors, preferring to develop its own silicon; meanwhile other reports say that Meta has dumped its plans to make its own AR/VR operating system in favour of modifying Android instead. We're not party to Meta's internal projects, but it does seem odd to make your own processors for somebody else's OS. One thing's for sure: Apple isn't doing that. Its headset will be running an Apple OS on Apple Silicon, just like the iPad, iPhone and MacBooks do.
