Forget Oculus Quest 2 — Facebook just teased killer Quest 3 upgrades

Oculus Quest 3 could be a big upgrade on the Oculus Quest 2
(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

Update: Currently, there's a good deal on for Cyber Monday for the Oculus Quest 2, and that makes it now a great time to hunt down the VR headset.

The Oculus Quest 2 may be our pick for the best VR headsets you can buy right now, but the Oculus Quest 3 looks like it will bring in some serious upgrades. 

In an interview with The Information (flagged by UploadVR), Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained how the next Oculus Quest could come with face and eye tracking to allow for users to have a more realistic presence in a virtual environment. Zuckerberg also basically confirmed that there’d be an Oculus Quest 4 in the not-so-distant future as well. 

“Because of how hardware gets developed, you kind of need to know what your next three products are going to look like all at the same time,” said Zuckerberg. “We have product teams spun up now working on the next few generations of virtual reality and what Quest 3 and 4 are gonna look like.” 

Give the appetite around finding where to buy the Oculus Quest 2, it’s no surprise that Facebook would capitalize upon the success its VR headset has been experiencing and plot out future generations. 

But while the Quest 2 is excellent for VR experiences and gaming, it would appear that more work is needed to make it a platform for having a truly compiling virtual presence. And one way to do that, according to Zuckerberg, could be with eye and face tracking. It would better capture a person's expressions and translate that onto a virtual avatar giving them a more realistic presence in a virtual environment.  

“One of the things I’m really excited about for future versions is getting eye tracking and face tracking in, because if you’re really excited about social presence you want to make sure the device has all the sensors to really kind of animate realistic avatars so you can communicate well,” Zuckerberg explained. 

The social networking luminary went on to explain that there are technical challenges to doing this given the number of sensors that would be needed in a VR headset. It’s worth remembering that the Oculus Quest and Quest 2 are both all-in-one systems, so have no external sensors and relatively constrained computing power. More advanced tracking generally tends to be the domain of expensive VR headsets attached to a powerful PC, such as the Valve Index

“On the VR side, I think the biggest things that we’re very focused on now are: how do you pack more sensors, to create a better social experience, into the device? To run each sensor requires more CPU power and that generates more heat and creates all these different issues,” said Zuckerberg. 

He continued to note that better face and eye tracking will yield more realistic avatars. Facebook has already got avatars on its main platform — check out our how to make your own Facebook avatar guide — but they have a very cartoon-like aesthetic. 

How soon Facebook will come up with a next-generation Oculus Quest isn't clear. But this gives us a teaser of what we could expect from the next Quest headset, and that’s rather promising. 

Roland Moore-Colyer

Roland Moore-Colyer a Managing Editor at Tom’s Guide with a focus on news, features and opinion articles. He often writes about gaming, phones, laptops and other bits of hardware; he’s also got an interest in cars. When not at his desk Roland can be found wandering around London, often with a look of curiosity on his face. 

  • anscarlett
    Yet another clickbait headline. Why not use an informative title instead of a sensationalist one?
    Reply
  • chebyrashka
    Forget about the Quest 3, the Quest 5 is going to have AMAZING features. I wouldn't buy any Quest right now since the 5 is going to knock them out of the park...
    Reply
  • Daggre
    The XR2 chip already supports 7 cameras, where the Quest 2 only utilizes 4 of those. I would love to see the Quest 3 implement a single camera for eye tracking inside the headset, one underneath the headset for mouth tracking, and one in the back of the headset to improve both 6dof tracking as well as hand/controller tracking behind the headset.
    Reply