As of today, developers can no longer support the original Oculus Quest in their store app updates, ending their ability to still support it.
Since May last year, new store apps haven't been allowed to support Quest 1. Now, even apps which existed before that date can't support Quest 1 in new updates.
If developers attempt to include Quest 1 support in their app manifest, Meta's store system will automatically block it.
Oculus Quest launched in May 2019, almost six years ago, featuring the two year old Snapdragon 835 chipset from 2017. Meta stopped selling Quest 1 immediately upon launching Quest 2, its twice as powerful yet cheaper successor, in October 2020.
Meta first announced the slow deprecation of Quest 1 in January 2023. The last operating system release it got was v50 in February 2023, and it stopped receiving security updates and bugfixes in August 2024. Quest 2, Pro, 3, and 3S are now on v72.
In practice, very few store apps still support Quest 1 today, regardless of this change. Meta's SDKs dropped support for Quest 1 in v51, which released in April 2023. That means developers using SDK versions newer than v50, required for features like Dynamic Resolution, Super Resolution, Virtual Keyboard, Multimodal, and Quest 3 features like the mixed reality Scene Mesh, Depth API, and Inside-Out Body Tracking already couldn't continue to support Quest 1.
Further, Quest 1 has just half the performance of Quest 2, which itself has less than half the GPU performance of Quest 3. Multiple VR game developers who have already dropped support for Quest 1 told UploadVR that it made up only a tiny fraction of their user base, while its anaemic eight-year-old chipset was burdensome to continue to support.
Quest 1 uses the Snapdragon 835.
This isn't yet the complete end of Quest 1 though. Quest 1 owners can continue to use their headset, and install and use older versions of existing apps that choose to continue to support it. However, still using Quest 1 isn't exactly recommended, given that it no longer gets security updates.
Unlike with some other consumer electronics companies Meta doesn't offer a trade-in program, so Quest 1 owners will need to pay the full price to upgrade to a newer headset, the most affordable (new) being the $300 Quest 3S.
The Game of the Year update will be the fourth major update for Batman: Arkham Shadow.
Update 1.1 arrived in November, around a month after launch, with a focus on fixes and quality of life improvements.
In December Update 1.2 added a character viewer, additional challenge maps from chapters 3 and 4, and localized voice acting for French, German, Italian, European Spanish, Latin American Spanish, Japanese, and Korean.
Then, on Wednesday this week, Camouflaj released the 1.3 update. It added a New Game+ Mode that allows you to carry over previous WayneTech progression and features an exclusive post-credits cinematic, as well as 'Infinite' versions of the game's Combat and Predator challenges, a new character viewer entry, and multiple bug fixes.
In our review of Batman: Arkham Shadow we described it as "faithful to the flatscreen Arkham games while innovating in its own way through VR-specific design", concluding that it's "a brilliant return for the Dark Knight". That Meta's Camouflaj doesn't seem done with the game yet will be welcome news for its most enthusiastic players.
Batman: Arkham Shadow remains free for Quest 3S buyers, and for new Quest 3 purchases since Meta Connect in October, or $50 for previous Quest 3 buyers.
As of this writing, just under 1 million people have unlocked the game's first achievement, which typically happens within the first 5 to 10 minutes of gameplay. This number dramatically grew over Christmas, as tracked by French YouTuber QuestWithMatt.
Over 1 million units of the Ray-Ban Meta glasses were sold in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told staff today.
The Ray-Ban Meta glasses start at $300, with polarized models offered for $330 and transition lens models for $380. That means 1 million units represents over $300 million in revenue. But what's still not publicly known is how much of this goes to Meta versus how much goes to EssilorLuxottica, the company behind the Ray-Ban brand.
For comparison, the previous generation, called Ray-Ban Stories, sold less than 300,000 units in 16 months, a memo leaked to The Wall Street Journal revealed. As another point of comparison, the achievement unlocked when completing the mixed reality demo experience First Encounters suggests that Meta has sold at minimum 2 million Quest 3 and Quest 3S headsets. Note that playing the demo requires permitting the headset to 3D scan your room.
According to the leaked meeting transcript, Zuckerberg went on to muse as to whether the next generation of the glasses might achieve two times or five times the sales volume:
“A lot of the big hit products in their third generation reached 5 to 10 million units”
“So I think one of the questions for us is, are we going to go from 1 million this year to 2 million? Are we going to go from 1 million to 5 million?”
Following this, Zuckerberg apparently pointed out that other tech giants will launch competitors, telling staff that until then Meta should take the opportunity to grow its smart glasses as fast as possible.
“We basically invented the category and our competitors haven’t really shown up yet and they will”
“I think we’ll probably start seeing some of that maybe a little later this year, maybe next year. But we just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses and we should take that opportunity.”
Samsung reportedly plans to launch a competitor with Google's Gemini AI, later this year or early next year, while Apple is reportedly exploring releasing its own in 2027. Meanwhile, around a dozen startups and smaller companies showed off similar smart glasses at CES 2025.
For this year, Meta plans to aggressively market the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, starting with Super Bowl ads featuring Chris Pratt and Chris Hemsworth next week.
Near the end of this year, Meta and EssilorLuxottica reportedly plan to launch Oakley Meta glasses, and Meta plans to launch more advanced smart glasses with a heads-up display (HUD), a higher end product that could reportedly be priced around $1000 and come with the company's long-in-development neural wristband.
Meta's CFO Susan Li indicated to investors yesterday that these plans will result in notably increased costs for its Reality Labs division, as it tries to push smart glasses into the mainstream. With this, Meta will soon find out whether displayless camera glasses with AI truly have mass market appeal, or whether at least some augmented reality functionality will be required to make glasses a meaningful part of its business.
"Long-term investments" will "land" later this year to make Horizon Worlds "more visually stunning and inspiring", Mark Zuckerberg told investors.
During Meta's Q4 earnings call, where the company reported its highest ever quarterly revenue from its Reality Labs AR/VR division, Mark Zuckerberg gave investors a very vague tease of what to expect from Horizon Worlds this year:
“This is the year that a number of the long-term investments that we’ve been working on that will make the metaverse more visually stunning and inspiring will really start to land. So I think we’re going to know a lot more about Horizon’s trajectory by the end of this year.”
It's entirely unclear what exactly Zuckerberg means by this.
When Horizon first launched back in 2020, both its avatars and worlds were ridiculed for their low detail graphics, and this criticism stood for years after. But over the past 18 months, Horizon Worlds has undergone significant changes to address this.
Originally all its worlds were created inside VR using primitive shapes and an in-VR visual scripting system, but now the leading worlds are built using traditional 3D asset creation pipelines and textual scripting. While it originally only provided these tools to professional game studios, Meta started rolling it out to interested individual creators last year. Further, the company launched revamped avatars with improved graphics in October.
It's possible that Zuckerberg is simply referring to a wider rollout of the professional creation tools that let Horizon Worlds environments look more like the VR games you purchase on the store.
But if that's not what he's talking about, what could it be? Could it be breakthrough upgrades to the platform's rendering capabilities, perhaps leveraging neural upscaling? Or could it even be cloud rendering, as it has been testing in its Avalanche project, which would offer the same kind of graphical fidelity as PC VR on standalone headsets? With such a vague quote it's impossible to know, but we'll keep a close eye on Meta for any details of what's coming for Horizon Worlds in 2025.
Meta Reality Labs achieved its highest ever quarterly revenue in Q4 2024, $1.083 billion, following the launch of Quest 3S.
Reality Labs is the division of Meta behind Quest headsets and their Horizon software platform, the technology side of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and research & development of AR glasses and their sEMG wristband input device.
In 2024 overall Reality Labs brought in $2.146 billion, up 13% from 2023.
“The number of people using Quest and Horizon has been steadily growing”, Mark Zuckerberg told investors, without giving specific user numbers.
Being the holiday season, Q4 has always been the strongest quarter for Reality Labs since Meta started breaking out its financials in Q4 2020. But Q4 2024 was the strongest ever, a continued success from Q4 2023, which saw the launch of Quest 3 drive the previous quarterly revenue record of $1.071 billion.
Quest 3S launched on October 15, and Q4 includes October, November, and December.
However, Reality Labs is still nowhere near making its first profit. The record revenue came alongside record spending too, a whopping $6.05 billion, resulting in a "loss" of $4.967 billion.
But while describing this as a loss is technically correct in a financial sense, in reality it's more accurate to describe most of it as long-term investment. XR headsets like Quest are still a relatively early technology, far from maturity, and as of 2022 more than 50% of Reality Labs spending was on the research and development of AR glasses, a future product line that hasn't even launched yet.
Meta may be planning to slowly rein in spending starting this year though, as last summer it reportedly told its hardware teams to cut spending by 20%. While in all previous quarters Meta's CFO Susan Li had warned investors that Reality Labs losses would increase, there was no such statement in this earnings call.
Combined with revenues from Quest 3S and the HUD glasses set to launch this year, two Quest 4 models reportedly planned for 2026, and an ultralight headset and AR glasses in 2027, Meta will seemingly soon start steering Reality Labs on the very long path to eventual profitability, which Mark Zuckerberg previously indicated to investors should arrive sometime in the 2030s.
Meta is seemingly planning to make Quest's 3D scene mesh automatically update when there are changes to your physical environment.
First spotted by VR enthusiast Luna, the changelog for v72 of the Meta XR Core SDK includes the following notice:
We are on a path to remove the user’s capability to edit the space settings in 2025, so developers should work to reduce dependency on this feature as it is incompatible with our vision of high-reliable scans that just work even when the scenes change.
Both Quest 3 and Quest 3S let you scan your room to generate a 3D scene mesh that mixed reality apps can use to reskin your environment or allow virtual objects to interact with physical geometry. But these scene mesh scans represent only a moment in time, when you performed the scan. If furniture has moved or objects have been added or removed from the room since then, these changes won't be reflected in mixed reality unless the user manually updates the scan. For example, if someone was standing in the room with you during the scan, their body shape is baked into the scene mesh.
In contrast, Apple Vision Pro and Pico 4 Ultra have continuous automatic scene meshing. Rather than having to perform a scan at all, these headsets are constantly scanning your environment in the background, providing a dynamic up-to-date mesh to the currently running app. The reason these headsets can do this is that they have hardware-level active depth sensors, whereas Quest 3 and Quest 3S use computationally expensive computer vision algorithms to derive depth (in Quest 3's case, assisted by a projected IR pattern).
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Clip from Meta firmware.
Based on the notice in the v72 SDK changelog, it sounds like Meta's upcoming solution will be a middle ground. It would, based on the description, still require the user to perform the initial scan, but update the mesh automatically in the background to reflect changes in the physical environment.
Given Meta's computational approach it seems possible that this improvement will incur a penalty to battery life, for apps that use the scene mesh.
We'll keep a close eye on Meta's upcoming Horizon OS updates for any sign of this feature shipping, as it should provide a significant upgrade to the mixed reality experience on Quest.
Meta's Reality Labs division's sales for 2024 were more than 40% higher than in 2023, according to a memo leaked to Business Insider.
Reality Labs is the division of Meta behind Quest headsets and their Horizon software platform, the technology side of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, and research & development of AR glasses and their sEMG wristband input device.
According to Business Insider, Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said the following in the internal memo, which was shared with all Reality Labs employees:
"2024 was a pivotal year for Reality Labs and positioned us for greatness in 2025"
"The team beat nearly all of last year's aggressive sales and user goals, growing RL sales >40% YoY overall"
"We are seeing massive sales growth in wearables and the Quest brand has never been stronger."
The leaked memo comes a few weeks after it was revealed that Quest 3S was the top selling games console on Amazon US in 2024, despite only releasing in October, and the Meta Horizon app needed to set up Quest headsets was the #1 free iPhone app on Christmas Day 2024. Further, SteamVR saw near-record usage in December.
Meta is set to publicly report its full 2024 finances later today during its Q4 2024 earnings call. The company has broken out Reality Labs' results since Q4 2020, and we'll bring you those figures as soon as they're available.
MKBHD's latest video gives the first real look at Samsung's upcoming headset, and the Android XR operating system it will run.
What Is Samsung's Headset?
Samsung's first standalone headset is launching this year, running Google's new Android XR operating system and powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 chipset.
Currently known as "Project Moohan", the headset will feature "state-of-the-art displays", eye tracking, hand tracking, and an external tethered battery. Beyond this, Samsung isn't yet sharing detailed specifications.
UploadVR's Ian Hamilton went hands-on with Samsung's headset last month, but we weren't allowed to take photos, videos, or screen recordings, so we could only show a Samsung-provided render of the headset and Google-provided Android XR simulator footage of select apps.
Now, Samsung and Google have given YouTuber Marques Brownlee an exclusive hands-on with the headset, including permission to capture and share footage of both the hardware and software.
When it comes to the hardware, Brownlee repeatedly remarks on the headset's distinct visual similarity to Apple Vision Pro, saying that when teasing the video before release with an image of him wearing the headset, many of his fans wondered why he was making another Vision Pro video.
He does however note four significant differences in the hardware: the face pad, the strap, the lack of EyeSight, and the open periphery (by default).
Apple Vision Pro has the same kind of ski-mask facial interface as Meta Quest and Pico headsets, where the pressure is distributed throughout your forehead, cheeks, temples, and nose. Samsung's headset on the other hand has a soft halo strap, similar to Meta Quest Pro and PlayStation VR2, where the majority of the pressure applies to your forehead and the front of the top of your head. Another difference with the face pad is that by default, Samsung's headset does not block out your view of the real world from the sides and below. Exactly like Quest Pro did, Samsung offers an optional light shield attachment for this.
When it comes to the strap, there are also significant differences. Both of the straps included with Apple Vision Pro are made of soft fabrics, which don't provide much of a counterbalance to the headset's weight. Samsung's headset uses a padded rigid plastic strap, similar to the Elite Strap accessory for Meta Quest headsets. This provides a counterbalance, but comes with a significant tradeoff: you can't really lay your head back on a sofa, bed, or chair to relax.
Apple Vision Pro also features a unique feature that hasn't shipped in any other headset: EyeSight. This feature uses a curved OLED panel with a lenticular lens on the front of the headset to show a rendered view of your eyes to others in the room with parallax, mimicking transparency. But it's relatively dim, the parallax doesn't work vertically, and it adds cost and weight to the product. Samsung's headset, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have any form of front display.
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Samsung's Android XR headset - in reality, not just a render.
Both found the implementation of the Gemini AI assistant to be far beyond Meta AI on Quest headsets or Siri on Apple Vision Pro.
While it is possible to ask Meta AI about what you're seeing, in the US & Canada at least, the assistant only responds with speech. Gemini on the other hand lets you circle real world objects, and can search the web or open Google Maps locations based on what it sees. Gemini can also perform a wide variety of tasks in the operating system and Google apps, whereas Meta AI is still quite limited
Further, Meta AI on Quest headsets simply captures an image upon your query, and currently only sees passthrough, not apps. Gemini on Android XR, on the other hand, can run a live session, continuing to see what you see while you ask questions, about both real world passthrough and the content of apps.
Siri on Apple Vision Pro offers a strange middle ground. While it can perform many visionOS tasks, it doesn't yet have visual capabilities, so can't see what you see.
Speaking of Google Maps, both Brownlee and Ian were highly impressed by its implementation on Android XR, with the ability to switch between the traditional flatscreen app view and immersive VR, reminiscent of Google Earth VR, at any time.
When it comes to the Android XR app launcher and system menus, Brownlee's preview shows it to be highly reminiscent of Apple's visionOS. Pressing the top button or opening your palm and pinching brings up a floating grid of circular app icons that can be scrolled horizontally by pinching and dragging.
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Android XR - in reality, not a simulator.
Samsung says its headset is still on track to launch later this year, but there's no word yet on a specific month.
We'll bring you any further news or reveals of Samsung's headset and Android XR, the new operating system set to shake up the industry - and perhaps even offer direct competition to Meta's Horizon OS and Quest headsets.
Snap is now offering its AR spectacles to students & educators for $49.50/month, a steep discount from the $99/month developer price.
The company behind Snapchat is offering this discounted price to students and faculty in the US, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands who have a valid education email.
Snap says the move is in response to an "overwhelming amount of interest from students, teachers, and staff from colleges and universities across the world".
As with the developer pricing, the minimum subscription term is 12 months, $594, and you must continue to pay the subscription to keep the hardware. Snap Spectacles are still only available for rental, not outright purchase, and Snap doesn't yet consider it a consumer product.
Snap Spectacles (2024) are fully standalone and wireless AR glasses, though their bulk pushes the limits of what can be described as a true glasses form factor.
They have a field of view of 46 degrees, similar to Xreal glasses and slightly below Hololens 2, and a 36 pixels per degree (PPD) resolution, similar to Apple Vision Pro.
While the onboard battery life of Snap Spectacles is just 45 minutes, the device has a USB-C port on one stem that you can use to power it with an external battery.
Spectacles run Snap OS, which the company describes as a "purpose-built, brand new operating system" for AR.
The glasses feature hand tracking, and the main menu of Snap OS is anchored to one of your hands to be interacted with using the other hand. It also has on-device speech recognition for text input.
Developers build "Lenses" for Snap OS, the company's terms for apps, using Lens Studio 5.0. Snap says developers can easily build Lenses using Spectacles Interaction Kit, and more advanced Lenses can be written using TypeScript and JavaScript. To identify, track, and augment real world objects, SnapML lets developers use custom machine learning models.
Additionally, developers can leverage your smartphone as a 6DoF tracked controller. And with Spectator Mode nearby smartphone users can see what you're seeing in AR.
With HoloLens 2 discontinued last year and Magic Leap focused on education, Spectacles has emerged as a new option for students and educational institutions looking for transparent augmented reality hardware, and we'll keep an eye out for interesting uses of Spectacles by students and educators alike.
Meta is working on a Quest Pro successor again, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports, after reportedly canceling two candidates in recent years.
In his latest report, in which he also said that Apple is still working on microLED displays for AR glasses, Gurman writes: "Meta is working on Quest 4 VR goggles, as well as a new high-end model that could eventually become a successor to the Quest Pro".
Meta executives have repeatedly mentioned working on "the next Quest", and last year The Information reported that Quest 4 is arriving in 2026 as two models, a budget model and a premium model, codenamed Pismo Low and Pismo High.
That report also mentioned a new Quest Pro arriving in 2027, codenamed La Jolla. But just one month later, The Information reported that the headset had been canceled in favor of a different 2027 headset, codenamed Puffin, an ultralight design with a tethered compute puck.
Then, in October, The Verge's Alex Heath said that during a discussion with Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth, he confirmed these two reported decisions and explained Meta's approach to developing new hardware, including citing the "tepid reaction" to the original Quest Pro as the reasoning for canceling La Jolla.
How Does Meta Develop & Cancel Hardware?
According to The Verge's Alex Heath, Bosworth cited the "tepid reaction" to the original Quest Pro as the reasoning for canceling La Jolla. But arguably more interestingly, Bosworth detailed the stages of Meta's hardware development cycle:
Pre-Discovery: a dedicated team is always "prototyping the craziest stuff", creating a "proof of experience" for each idea.
Discovery: a "small number" of Pre-Discovery concepts are approved by executive review to proceed to the Discovery phase, where "a few" employees examine the practicalities of industrial design and cost.
Prototyping: if deemed practical, Discovery concepts are prototyped, involving "maybe 10 times more people", who build integrated hardware and software to bring the concept to life.
Engineering Validation Test: "roughly half" of those prototypes go to this final stage, where they are put on the product roadmap. Of these EVTs, Meta executives apparently kill “about half” before they ship, while the others release to the public.
Heath says Bosworth told him the ultralight headset with a puck, codenamed Puffin, was moved from Pre-Discovery to Discovery. That means it could still be killed off in Prototyping or the EVT phase.
This makes Gurman's new reference to "a new high-end model that could eventually become a successor to the Quest Pro" all the more confusing. Is Gurman referring to Puffin, or to yet another Quest Pro successor project, separate to either La Jolla or Puffin? It's entirely unclear, but keep reading UploadVR as we'll bring you news of any future mention of a Quest Pro 2 from reliable sources.
David Heaney
David Heaney
