Andrew Bosworth, VP at Facebook’s Reality Labs, has given some more hints as to what’s in store for future Oculus hardware. In an audio Q&A with John Carmack on Twitter Spaces transcribed by UploadVR, Bosworth suggested that while last year’s Quest 2 will be sticking around for some time yet, the company is working on headsets with greater capabilities.
“People are also asking about the Quest 3, which doesn’t exist yet, and [for] everyone who is listening to us who is a reporter — there isn’t a Quest 3, there’s only a Quest 2.” Bosworth said. “But I did hint at an AMA earlier this year about Quest Pro because we do have a lot of things in development where we want to introduce new functionality to the headset along the kinds that people theorize that we would want to introduce, and that’s a little ways off still. It’s still not gonna happen this year.”
“For those who are curious, Quest 2 is going to be in the market for a while — for a long while,” Bosworth continued. “And it’s going to be, you know, I think the best bet for the most accessible way to get into VR and have a great experience.”
The discussion is particularly relevant right now because last week Facebook announced the first title that’s exclusive to the Quest 2 headset — Resident Evil 4 VR won’t run on the original Quest. While the Quest 2 hardware is significantly more powerful than its predecessor, the announcement could have made owners of either headset wary about Facebook’s long-term support.
Carmack, now a consulting technical officer at Facebook, said he was “supportive of Quest 2-only exclusives but believes there’s “still a pretty substantial market there in Quest 1 users.” Bosworth agreed, saying “I expect the incentives to be for developers to support Quest 1, absolutely. You are unlocking, you know, seven figures of additional users who could potentially buy your software — which is a pretty good deal when you can get it.
“The formal answer is that we may eventually allow developers who have really high-end apps to target Quest 2 alone, but our very strong recommendation is to support both, and that’s actually what we expect to have happen based on historical norms,” Bosworth added, implying that the Resident Evil 4 VR situation may not be all that common for now.
