There's a high-end Oculus headset coming sometime next year

Facebook Connect kicked off with a keynote presentation on Thursday, and the company had several announcements to share. Including a new company brand name, new games on the way, and some insights into its experimental work with advanced XR technology. Meta also revealed that it would release a new Oculus headset next year, but it's not the Quest 2 successor you might be expecting.

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Meta revealed Project Cambria, an advanced device that will be on the market next year with a premium price tag.

"This is not the next Quest. It will be compatible with Quest. But it's a completely new, advanced, and high-end product. It will be at the high-end of the price spectrum, too, said Mark Zuckerberg. "Our plan is the keep building out this product line to release our most advanced technology before we can hit the price points that we target with Quest. "

Project Cambria will include cameras and sensors that enable natural expression in VR, such as face cameras that track your facial expressions and eye-tracking to bring eye contact into VR experiences.

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The Project Cambria headset will also feature a colored, high-resolution, mixed reality passthrough. You'll be able to work at your desk and pick up things like a pen to write on paper without taking the headset off. That sounds a lot like Varjo's XR-3 headset without the human-eye resolution and bionic display. The first headset to do this was Vrvana's Totem, likely the foundation of Apple's upcoming XR headset.

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The upcoming high-end Oculus headset will include a new type of lens that allows for a reduced visor size. The new lenses, dubbed "pancake optics." Meta said the lenses work by "folding light several times over to achieve a slimmer profile than current lenses." The new lens technology is complex to manufacture, and Meta said it would need to control all aspects of production to maintain quality control. Could that be a hint that Meta is moving into the hardware manufacturing business?

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Meta said that Project Cambria would be released sometime next year. The company didn't give any hints about how long we'll have to wait for a full reveal.