Not to be outdone with all the other hardware announcements going on at the moment, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and incoming CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth have teased three separate virtual reality (VR) prototypes the company is currently developing.
Bosworth – who is head of Facebook Reality Labs – started with quite a stylish looking standalone prototype (in comparison to the others) with a shiny, almost mirrored black front. In a tweet, he said: “Proud of the research Michael Abrash’s team is working on at FRL-R Redmond—excited to get an early look at some of the technologies that will underpin the metaverse (we work on several prototype headsets to prove out concepts, this is one of them. Kind of. It’s a long story.)”
He then followed that up with the headset seen below, what looks like a heavily modded Oculus Quest with a halo strap and a bunch of sensors underneath – could those be for facial tracking? No further details were provided at this stage, so you’ll just have to stare at the images and ponder what this new tech might do.
Over on Facebook, Zuckerberg posted the image seen above, revealing that this particular model has a retina display: “I spent the day with the Facebook Reality Labs research team in Redmond to demo our next-generation virtual reality, augmented reality and artifical intelligence tech. This one is an early retina resolution prototype. The future is going to be awesome.”
While it’s no surprise that FRL has several VR prototypes being worked on the timing is quite funny. HTC Vive has its special reveal event today, although it looks like that bubble has already been burst. Lynx-R1 launched a successful Kickstarter that easily hit its goal and enterprise-focused Varjo has its own unveiling event coming up. All of this before Facebook Connect on 28th October.
In the past, these sorts of prototypes would’ve been showcased at the annual conference but maybe with everything going on Facebook wanted in on the buzz. Plus, if the company is happily sharing these hardware snippets now, what else does FRL have up its sleeve? An Oculus Quest Pro maybe? There are exactly two weeks to wait to find out. For continued updates, keep reading VRFocus.