Meta has announced that it is opening up the Meta Quest operating system to third-party hardware manufacturers with a new operating system that will be called Meta Horizon OS.
So far, three partners have been announced with the company announcing that it is partnering with Microsoft to create a limited-edition Quest headset “inspired by Xbox” which is all we get from the announcement so far, although he does go on to use a Meta Quest 3 that “comes out of the box with Xbox controllers and Game Pass” as an example.
This follows on from the Xbox Cloud Gaming app coming to the Meta Quest 3 late last year allowing gamers to play Xbox games with nothing but a Meta Quest 3 and an Xbox controller.
Alongside Microsoft, it’s also been confirmed that ASUS is creating an “all-new performance gaming headset” that will leverage Meta Horizon OS and Lenovo is developing “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning and entertainment”.
“The growth of the mixed reality market and the rising popularity of use cases like gaming, entertainment, fitness, productivity, and social presence have created new opportunities for specialised hardware,” Meta writes. “As we’ve seen with the PC and smartphone industries, consumers are best served by a broad hardware ecosystem producing both general-purpose computing devices and more specialised products, all running on a common platform.” said Meta in a blog post.
This is definitely an exciting prospect as there’s no doubt above all, Meta has won the VR race in terms of reaching a mainstream mass audience, so to see that other brands are leveraging that rather than creating competing products is absolutely a win for all involved.
We’ll let you know when we have concrete announcements of any of these products, which all seemingly feel like they’re a considerable way into the pipeline going off what’s mentioned in the blog post.
