Lowering weight and rising efficiency are two of crucial components in pushing standalone XR headsets ahead. Whereas Meta has proven off its personal Orion AR glasses prototype utilizing a wi-fi compute unit, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth doesn’t assume an identical setup is the magic bullet for standalone VR gaming.
Bosworth, who can be head of the corporate’s Actuality Labs XR staff, held one other one in every of his Instagram Q&As earlier this week, the place he sometimes delves into all kinds of subjects—some skilled, some private.
Within the newest session, Bosworth expounded as regards to wi-fi compute models, and the way the corporate thinks they aren’t the suitable match for its standalone VR headsets.
“We’ve checked out this a bunch of occasions. Wi-fi compute pucks simply actually don’t remedy the issue. If you happen to’re wi-fi, they nonetheless have a battery on the headset, which is a serious driver of weight. And, positive, you’re gaining some thermal house so your efficiency may probably be higher, though you’re considerably restricted now by bandwidth since you’re utilizing a radio,” Bosworth says.
Technical hurdles apart, Meta is primarily targeted on constructing one thing accessible to shoppers, with its newest Quest 3S promoting for as little as $300 for the 128GB model. Bosworth continues:
“You’ve elevated your value dramatically, as a result of even when your main silicon is within the wi-fi compute puck, you continue to want fairly a little bit of silicon to simply energy the shows and do the native corrections required there, and deal with the stream of information. So it actually finally ends up … the mathematics doesn’t work, is what I’m saying. And it doesn’t find yourself saving you that a lot weight and dramatically will increase your value and complexity.”
This is available in distinction to Meta’s Orion prototype, which does incorporate a wi-fi compute unit. Granted, Orion isn’t going to be productized on account of its huge value—a reported $10,000 per-unit owing to its difficult-to-produce silicon carbide lenses, nevertheless it’s clear that in some circumstances wi-fi pucks do make sense—particularly in delivering much less immersive graphics to AR glasses.
Then once more, Bosworth has mentioned its first pair of AR glasses for shoppers gained’t hit at that Quest price-point once they land sooner or later sooner or later. Bosworth mentioned again in September that such a tool is “not going to be low-cost,” noting nevertheless the corporate goals to make them accessible “at the least within the house of cellphone, laptop computer territory.”