Welcome to Lowpass! This week: How Meta is blurring the lines between VR and mixed reality, and what Google’s top TV exec thinks about the competition.

Meta’s Horizon Worlds will get mixed reality, Gaussian splatting

I’ve spent a good chunk of the last two days at Meta’s annual Connect developer conference, where I got to try the company’s Orion AR glasses prototype as well as its new Quest 3s VR headset, and a couple of pretty intriguing VR and mixed reality demos.

Orion clearly stole the show, and I’ll have more on that soon. But for this week’s edition of Lowpass, I decided to focus instead on Meta’s VR efforts, including the Quest 3s, and some very interesting VR and mixed reality use cases. These didn’t get as much attention during Wednesday’s keynote, but could fundamentally change how developers build and users participate in social experiences on Meta’s Quest headsets.

Ever wanted to make a digital twin of your own living room, and then invite others to join you in it in VR? It’s on Meta’s roadmap – which, thanks to a significant overhaul of the company’s hardware line-up, just entered a new era.

The Quest’s stable era is here. Meta Horizon OS and Quest VP Mark Rabkin clearly is a fan of the Netflix Sci-Fi drama Three Body. During Wednesday’s developer keynote, he half-jokingly argued that Meta’s VR hardware business was entering a “stable era.” In the show, that’s a period of stability, peace and prosperity. 

For Meta, it means that all of its VR headsets offer the same features, and developers don’t have to deal with fragmentation anymore. To do that, Meta is discontinuing the Quest 2 and Quest Pro, and introducing a new, more affordable Quest 3s. I tried the Quest 3s this week, and while I didn’t have a chance to do a side-by-side comparison, I walked away with the impression that feels very much like a Quest 3 with slightly lower-quality optics (the two headsets are powered by the same processor and also feature the same pass-through cameras for mixed reality).

I had a chance to chat with Rabkin after the keynote, and he told me that he has “pretty lofty hopes” for Quest 3s sales, thanks to the $300 entry-level price tag. “We're counting on it to generate a new surge of growth in the ecosystem,” Rabkin said, adding that cutting down the Quest line-up to just three devices (a $300 128 GB Quest 3s, a $400 256 GB Quest 3s and a $500 512 GB Quest 3 with pancake lens optics) helped make it a lot less confusing to retailers and consumers.

“It’s the first time in four years running this program that I'm able to put [out] a line of devices that is easy to explain, clear, makes sense,” Rabkin said.

And with every Quest device sold by Meta supporting pass-through going forward, Rabkin also hopes that developers will feel a lot less hesitant to invest in truly transformative mixed reality experiences – things that simply wouldn’t be possible on a Quest 2.

Mixed reality is coming to Horizon Worlds. One of the things I got to try on the Quest 3s this week was a mixed reality world within Horizon Worlds. In it, I could see my real-world surroundings in pass-through, and play some mini games like darts and a memory game. All of the games were anchored to a cocktail table-like object in the middle of the room, which was central to making mixed reality work in social spaces like this, according to Rabkin.

“One of the biggest issues in multiplayer, remote mixed reality experiences is that you're in [a] room, and I'm in a totally different room,” he explained. “Different size, different geometry, different whatever.” By asking people to position an “anchor wheel” in their room, Horizon Worlds is able to have everyone gather around a central point that transcends the physical differences of each room. “It’s a very subtle way to do it,” Rabkin said.

Meta has been testing mixed reality in Horizon Worlds with some users for a few months now, and has plans to make it more widely available in the future. “We expect that to be available to all creators”, Rabkin said. “Creators in Horizon will be able to choose what kind of world [they’re building], and what blend of pass-through, or not, it is.”

Get ready for Gaussian splats in Horizon Worlds. Another very interesting demo I saw at Connect was what Meta has been calling Hyperscape: 3D-scanned rooms that can be explored in VR. For the demo, Meta scanned a handful of studios of artists like Daniel Arsham and Rebecca Fox with phones using Gaussian splatting, and then added additional information layers to explain each artist’s tools of the trade. The scans were pretty high fidelity, and freely exploring the studios was a very compelling experience.

Right now, Hyperscape is a standalone Quest app (you can try it out here), but the company has plans to add this technology to Horizon Worlds as well, as Rabkin confirmed during our conversation. 

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