Facebook will not launch an Oculus Quest Pro in 2021 and expects Quest 2 to be on the market and sold to buyers “for a long time,” according to the company’s virtual reality boss.
Two of Facebook’s most vocal leaders in virtual reality, Vice President Andrew Bosworth and technical consultant John Carmack, took part in a question and answer session on Twitter on Friday, April 16, after asking Twitter users questions. Their conversation covered a number of topics, and we’ll digest them all for a live discussion on our YouTube channel on Monday, so be sure to subscribe to UploadVR and enable notifications for an alert when the conversation is in progress.
For now, however, we have transcribed one of the most interesting segments of the conversation in which Bosworth pointed to the original Oculus Quest market, launched in 2019, is somewhere north of several million headphones. This market size, of course, is fading compared to the adoption of the $ 299 – Facebook 2 – Facebook tracking – which is lighter, more powerful, and less expensive than its predecessor. Yesterday, Resident Evil 4 was announced as the first exclusive to Quest 2. Bosworth also teased the prospect of a future Quest Pro in another question and answer session earlier this year.
So what exactly should developers focus on if they want to create software for the Facebook Quest headset line? Should I ignore the original Quest? And should consumers interested in buying a Quest 2 if Facebook launches new headphones so fast? The following transcript of the discussion should provide enlightening answers to both questions:
John Carmack: I support the Quest 2 exclusives, but I think if a developer does something to make money, there’s still a pretty substantial market out there in Quest 1 users … Boz you can tell about what percentages I’ve announced that obviously Quest 2 goes beyond Quest 1 and all our other headphones, but for developers to make some kind of rational decision about how much effort they want to put into Quest 1, it’s kind of important for them to know what that might mean.
Andrew Bosworth: “I expect the incentives for developers to support Quest 1 absolutely, and from your point of view, we don’t think it’s too expensive to do that and unlock, you know, 7 digits of additional users who could buy your software – which is a pretty good deal when you can get it … so the formal answer is that we can finally allow developers who have high-performance applications to target Quest 2 on their own, but our very strong recommendation is to support both and this is actually what we expect to happen based on historical norms … ”
Andrew Bosworth: People are also wondering about Quest 3, which doesn’t exist yet, and all those who listen to us, who are reporters there is no Quest 3, there is only one Quest 2, but I suggested to an AMA earlier this year about Quest Pro, because we have a lot of things under development that we want to introduce new features to the headset, along with the types that people theorize that we would like. to introduce them., and that’s still a long way off. It still won’t happen this year. For the curious, Quest 2 will be on the market for a while – for a long time, and it will be, you know, I think the best bet for the most affordable way to get into VR and have a great experience.