Data miners have uncovered more clues as to what the Meta Quest 4, or at least an upcoming Meta VR headset, will look like.
What came out of these efforts are an extremely low-resolution render of the device and a highly stylised line drawing of its basic shape. But this is still enough to show how much of a major departure this is from the Meta Quest 3.
Data miners who go by the online handles Luna and Samulis pulled this information out of Meta firmware — seemingly from part of the software that helps owners setup their headset.
They offer a look at a headset that clearly appears to be a VR device rather than a pair of smart glasses, and one that also has eye tracking.
Size and bulk are the key ways this headset departs from what we have today. While you likely wouldn’t want to walk around town with one of these upcoming Meta headsets on, it’s clearly smaller and most likely significantly lighter than a Meta Quest 3.
This is in part down to two factors you can’t see in these scraped images. Reports suggest this slimmed-down headset will have a separate computing puck, used to house the processor and battery, rather than baking them into the headset itself.
The renders also leave out the rear section of the headset, and exactly how it interfaces with the wearer’s head. However, as this design is still a way off that of the Meta Ray-Ban Display, it’s likely to require more than just a pair of glasses stems.
Meta Quest 4 Expected Features
One new feature is already revealed in these leaks: eye tracking. This is used in the Apple Vision Pro to let you select on-screen items by looking at them, and was employed in the Meta Quest Pro but not the Quest 3S or 3.
Earlier reports also suggest Meta is considering a switch to micro OLED display tech, rather than the 2,064 x 2,208 resolution LCD panels used in the Quest 3. While this would increase immersion and image quality, it is yet to be seen in any vaguely affordable headset. Pimax’s Crystal Super micro-OLED costs $2,199, for example.
That these leaks refer to software references suggest progress on the headset’s development could be quite advanced. But recent severe changes within Reality Labs diminish confidence in the idea these headset plans remain concrete.
Amid studio closures, staffing cuts within Meta’s Reality Labs and an official focus shift of Horizon Worlds towards mobile, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has confirmed the company is taking a new step-back approach to VR. “We’re going to let VR be what it is,” Bosworth told Axios in an interview earlier this year. Bad news for a Meta Quest 4?
