If you tuned in to yesterday’s Meta Quest Gaming Showcase, you got an early look at one of the best VR games ever made. Asgard’s Wrath 2 looks mind-blowingly good, and it’s a reminder of just how far our industry has come in the last few years. When the original Asgard’s Wrath came out in 2019, it felt like a turning point for VR games — the graphics were amazing, the scale of the world was massive, and the physics and gameplay were something else. But the number of people who could actually experience it was held back by the limitations of VR technology at the time.
That’s because four years ago, you needed an expensive gaming PC connected to your headset just to run games like this, which put a pretty hard cap on how many people got to enjoy them. So it’s great news to see that just a few years later, a sequel that’s bigger and better in every way is launching on Meta Quest 2 and the upcoming Quest 3, our line of standalone VR devices. The kind of experiences that were once only possible using a powerful gaming rig in combination with a headset now just work on the headset, making them both accessible to a lot more people — and a lot more fun to play.
This seems like the right moment to reflect not just on just how far our industry has come, but also on why things are about to accelerate once again. It was only ten years ago when the Oculus Rift DK1 kicked off the modern VR era, giving developers and early adopters their first glimpse of the future. The technology took its next leap forward in 2019 with Meta Quest, the first standalone device capable of doing everything on its own — no wires, no attached PC, just a headset that does it all right out of the box.
This set the stage for millions of people to discover the power of VR for the first time, and it became the standard for mass market VR devices. As we revealed yesterday, Meta Quest 3 is the next step in that journey. But it’s also the beginning of something new.
WHAT’S NEXT
What’s so exciting about 2023 is that after a decade of progress following Rift, the next era for this technology is now coming into focus. Not only will VR make another leap forward in both hardware and content this year, but more people than ever before will also be able to experience an early form of augmented reality on their VR headset. These so-called mixed reality headsets like Meta Quest 3, coming later this year, will add a new layer to VR devices, enabling them to blend the physical and digital worlds together in a way that’s simply not possible on today’s phones and PCs.
The rise of mixed reality is an early milestone in one of the biggest changes likely to come to computing in our lifetimes. Ever since the invention of the first PCs, our digital interactions have been contained to screens which forced us to choose between our devices and our environment. We see this barrier dissolving over time, as AR technology allows us to simply enhance the world around us while remaining completely present. We believe this will be the basis of a new kind of computing platform as revolutionary as the PC itself.
Yesterday we shared a first look at Meta Quest 3, which comes with Meta Reality, a stack of hardware and software that enables the next generation of mixed reality experiences. At its most basic level, mixed reality lets you see the world around you inside your headset and overlay it with digital objects. Meta Reality expands on this by enabling a headset to understand your space, create accurate digital representations of it, and recognize and respond to objects in that space. It also allows you to interact with this blended physical and virtual environment in a seamless, natural way.
We first shipped Meta Reality on Quest Pro in 2022, giving developers and early adopters access to the technology for the first time. Now it’s coming to Quest 3, where every aspect of the device, from the sensors and displays to the operating system, controllers and software, was built from the ground up to make Meta Reality shine.