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Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2 headset garnered rave reviews towards the end of 2020 only, but its success means the company shows no signs of slowing down its VR ambitions. In an interview with The Information, CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that not only is a successor to Oculus Quest 3 in the works, but the company is already in the early stages of work on Oculus Quest 4.
“Because of the way the hardware is developed, you need to know what your next three products will look like at the same time,” Zuckerberg said.
“It’s not like software where we change it every two weeks. We have product teams that are now working on the next generations of VR and what Quest 3 and 4 will look like.”
The biggest developments for future Oculus Quest devices, according to Zuckerberg? “Do eye tracking and face tracking,” he says.
“If you’re really excited about social presence, you need to make sure the device has all the sensors to animate realistic avatars so you can communicate well.”
Features vs comfort
The big push for Oculus appears to be on the social side of VR. Zuckerberg and his team seek to make social interactions in virtual reality more natural and realistic as they see more and more people hanging out, playing games and working together in their digital spaces. But that ambition is challenging from a hardware perspective.
“On the VR side, I think the most important things that we are very focused on right now are: how do you pack more sensors to create a better social experience on the device?” He continued during the interview.
“Running each sensor requires more CPU power and that generates more heat and creates all these different problems.
“When I think about where you are today with VR, there are some great games and different experiences, but I would love to get to the point where you have realistic avatars of yourself and where you can make authentic eye contact with someone and have real expressions that are reflected in your avatar.
“So what do you need for that? Well, you need to be able to do eye tracking to make eye contact. You need to have some sense of face tracking or a sense of what is going on with the person’s expressions in order to have those emotions come up. natural “.
Bringing humans to virtual reality is an interesting hurdle for any virtual reality company or application. Existing Oculus avatars can already simulate lip movement when recognizing speech reaching the headset microphone, but they are still disembodied torsos with limited expression.
Facebook announced in September that the current Oculus Avatars system will soon be replaced by the Facebook VR avatar setup, with a team of designers (including Pixar alumni) bringing the most cartoonish characters to life alongside meeting spaces from Facebook Horizon and Venues.
But Facebook’s most ambitious avatar experiments remain its ‘Codec Avatars’, which manipulated 132 cameras to generate a real image of a virtual reality user, animated in a virtual reality space in real time. The public demonstration of this system took place in 2019, so, a few years after its development, perhaps this is a feature that we can expect to see commercialized in a future Oculus product.
Via: The Information / UploadVR
