Meta wants to be the Microsoft of headsets

Mark Zuckerberg onstage astatine Meta Connect 2023. | Getty Images

Meta has started licensing the operating strategy for its Quest headset to different hardware makers, starting with Lenovo and Asus. It’s besides making a limited-run, gaming-focused Quest with Xbox.

On the taxable of opening up, Meta is besides pushing for much ways to observe alternate app stores. It’s making its experimental App Lab store much salient and adjacent inviting Google to bring the Play Store to its operating system, which is present called Horizon OS. In a blog post, Meta additionally said that it’s moving connected a spatial model for developers to much easy larboard their mobile apps to Horizon OS.

Crucially for Meta, Horizon OS includes the Horizon societal layer, a 3D, Roblox-meets-The Sims open-world platform. After a buggy and sluggish start connected the Quest, Meta has been moving to amended Horizon and precocious brought it to the web arsenic a 2D experience. Now, immoderate hardware institution that wants to physique a instrumentality with Horizon OS volition assistance widen the scope of Horizon the societal network, which Meta wants to yet monetize with ads and commerce. (Yes, this is approaching Google levels of naming confusion.)

Meta has yet to stock much connected the concern presumption of its Horizon OS license, speech from that societal web tie-in and requiring the usage of Qualcomm chips. “You tin ideate a lightweight headset that pairs with your machine connected your table to supply the champion enactment acquisition astatine location oregon anyplace you go,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said successful a video announcing the news. “Or ideate 1 that’s afloat focused connected watching immersive amusement similar movies and videos with the highest solution OLED screens retired there.” Spokespeople for Lenovo, Asus, and Xbox didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Meta isn’t giving up connected making its ain first-party headsets, either. Zuckerberg has been wide that helium wants his institution to beryllium a much unfastened level than Apple’s. Here, he’s firmly positioning Meta’s Horizon OS arsenic the Android alternate to Apple’s Vision Pro. Given however Android was much of a absorption to the iPhone, an analogy he’d astir apt similar is however Microsoft built the aboriginal PC marketplace by licensing Windows.

This has been a agelong clip coming. “In the unfastened ecosystem, fundamentally you person overmuch broader partnerships,” Zuckerberg told maine successful an interrogation successful the autumn of 2022. “So Microsoft didn’t physique the chips; they didn’t physique the PCs; they didn’t physique the App Store. It was each this cardinal worldly that was developed astir the ecosystem. Similar to Android. And that’s fundamentally what we anticipation to physique present — is the unfastened ecosystem for the adjacent procreation of computing astir virtual and augmented world successful the metaverse much broadly, which means that determination are going to request to beryllium each these partnerships.”