Meta would have several new Quest helmets in her pipes

New Oakley smart glasses, glasses with integrated screen, augmented reality glasses… Meta is indeed very busy on this front. But there’s more to life than just glasses! The social media giant also has plans for its Quest range, as revealed by Mark Gurman, the Bloomberg snoop who doesn’t only give indiscretions about Apple.

A Quest 4 is also in the pipeline, without further details. This is hardly surprising: the range has been very successful, as we saw again at Christmas, and Meta is still largely the leader among manufacturers of virtual and mixed reality headsets.

Why stop there? Of course, it remains to be seen what kind of wood this Quest 4 will be made of: will the manufacturer want to try its luck again with a product costing more than €500, while the formula of the Quest 3S, cheaper but less powerful, seems to satisfy the majority of users?

More interestingly, Mark Gurman mentions "a new high-end model that could eventually become the successor to the Quest Pro mixed reality headset". Meta definitively put an end to the suffering of the Quest Pro at the beginning of January, after noting the flop of this model. The future of this segment is particularly confused, several prototypes have reportedly been purely and simply cancelled, first in July 2023 and then in August (the "La Jolla" project). As for the headset developed with LG, its fate is still in limbo.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta's technical director, had nevertheless suggested last summer that technically speaking, the Quest Pro 2 had not been cancelled, only a prototype. However, it is difficult not to read this as an admission of failure. For some time now, rumors have been circulating of a "Project Puffin," a concept for a very lightweight headset (110 grams) that would look more like glasses than a headset, but would remain firmly anchored in virtual reality and mixed reality (where screens still display the external environment with the help of cameras).

The Quest Pro 2 could be the concrete incarnation of Puffin... or is it something else entirely!

Source: Bloomberg