Asus and Lenovo have already announced their intentions to develop headsets
Meta has been pouring tens of billions of dollars into the development of augmented and virtual reality technology, though without yet seeing the popularity it had expected in its Quest operating system.
Now it is making moves to broaden its appeal
It appears that Meta may be making moves to make its own augmented and virtual reality platform more accessible than Apple has done with its Vision Pro mixed reality headset that currently comes with a price tag of $3,500 to access visionOS.
The Meta Quest operating system is being opened up to third parties to make it possible for VR headsets to be developed to access and expand the ecosystem and its overall appeal. This means that third-party hardware will be able to access Quest, a move that already has other companies announcing their strategies to develop their own compatible gadgets.
A virtual reality operating system rebrand
At the same time that Meta announced that it was opening the doors to allow third-party companies to participate in its VR operating system with their own devices, it also announced that it was rebranding with potentially significant software distribution policy changes. It is expected that the Meta software ecosystem will be more open.
Moving forward, devices that use the Meta virtual reality platform will be running on what it now calls the Meta Horizon OS. That name change will also apply to what had been known as the Quest app store, which will become known as the Meta Horizon Store moving forward. Furthermore, the Meta Quest companion mobile application is changing to the Meta Horizon app.
The first brands interested in partnering with this operating system have already been announced as Asus and Lenovo. It will be the ROG gaming-focused unit at Asus and a mixed-reality Lenovo device. Microsoft will also be releasing an Xbox-branded Meta Quest.
Each of the new virtual reality products will be running on the same Qualcomm chips that power currently available Quest devices. That said, internals, lenses, or other configurations could certainly change when compared to the current Quest gadgets.
