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In the ongoing quest to make standalone XR headsets lighter and more powerful, two elements remain at the forefront: reducing weight and boosting performance. Meta, for instance, has taken notable strides with its Orion AR glasses, which feature a wireless compute unit. Yet, Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, believes this might not be the perfect solution for standalone VR gaming.
Bosworth, who heads up Meta’s Reality Labs XR team, regularly holds Q&A sessions on Instagram where he touches on both professional and personal topics. During his most recent session, he shared some insights on why wireless compute units might not be the right choice for their standalone VR devices.
“We’ve explored this option numerous times,” Bosworth stated. “Wireless compute pucks don’t really get to the heart of the issue. Even if you go wireless, the headset still needs a battery, which contributes significantly to its weight. Sure, you might gain some room for better performance due to reduced thermal constraints, but now you’re limited by the bandwidth of a wireless connection,” he explained.
Despite these technical challenges, Meta’s primary goal is to create consumer-friendly products. Take the Quest 3S, for example, which is available for as little as $300 for the 128GB version. Bosworth added, “The cost shoots up significantly because even if your main processing power is housed in the wireless compute puck, you still need enough processing power within the headset itself to manage the displays, perform local corrections, and handle data streams. Ultimately, the math doesn’t work out. You’re not saving much weight, and the cost and complexity increase significantly.”
Contrasting this, Meta’s Orion prototype does indeed make use of a wireless compute unit. However, it isn’t moving toward production due to its steep cost—apparently $10,000 per unit because of the challenging-to-manufacture silicon carbide lenses. Despite this, in certain applications, particularly those providing less immersive graphics for AR glasses, wireless pucks find their place.
Bosworth also touched on the future of AR glasses from Meta. Unlike the approachable pricing of the Quest series, their first consumer AR glasses won’t be hitting the market at such friendly prices. Back in September, Bosworth hinted that the device wouldn’t come cheap, though the company does aim to place them “somewhere in the ballpark of phones or laptops.”
