Within Facebook’s Meta announcements today was a new high-end headset meant for VR/AR, as well as new tools for developers to create virtual and half-virtual worlds. It’s called Project Cambria.
Zuckerberg has said the headset is “completely new” and not a fitting entry into the Quest range. As such, it’ll carry a premium price tag.
The below video was teased at the announcement event.
You can get a glimpse of the Cambria controller floating around as well as how the new headset looks.
The Project Cambria headset has cameras that pass through high-res video to the headset’s screens, as well as face and eye tracking and other sensors.
All this points to augmented reality, the practice of projecting images onto your real surroundings, similar to what the Quest already offers but with better specs. In order to justify its claim that Cambria truly isn’t just a Quest sequel, it’ll have to prove the utility of those “other sensors” instead of incrementally improving the hardware.
There’s no release date as of yet, but Facebook – er, Meta – has already started rolling out new developer kits that’ll support both Quest and Cambria content.
There were a number of SDKs and APIs talked about as part of the Project Cambria drop, but it’s probably more useful to talk about the experiences this tech will enable.
A new system will allow developers to lock a virtual object into 3D real space, remembering it if you look away and back again. This is one step closer to your “virtual home” being different to your real home, and family members can leave things for others to find in the semi-virtual space.
Another new capability is mapping a virtual space to the size of someone’s room automatically, so you can create whatever experiences you want without the fear of them running into a wall. You can have a virtual character also navigate this space without clipping through real walls and objects.
Facebook is also making its Unity library more available so devs can copypasta hand gestures into their project like grabbing, poking, selecting, and targeting virtual objects. They can also create their own gestures for the app to recognise.
All of this of course does nothing to dispel the idea that Facebook’s Metaverse is nothing but a billionaire’s Ready Player One fantasy. We’re now taking bets on how many 80s-themed Easter eggs the metaverse will contain.