Meta Announces New ‘Horizons OS’ Program For Opening Its Platform For Third-Party Teams Including Xbox

For years now, Facebook now-Meta has continued to pour in support to the virtual reality market for roughly a decade. With the acquisition of then-Oculus, the firm expanded this niché peripheral into a fully blown out platform. Since then, we’ve witnessed partnerships form with Meta and its virtual reality industry. Just this past fall, the firm teamed with Microsoft to integrate Xbox Cloud Gaming/Xbox Game Pass for its headsets.

The announcement came as a surprise when Microsoft has been adamant on keeping its distance for virtual reality support on the platform. Around the same time, the Xbox company did confirm to be shuttering its mixed reality venture. Additionally, while vocal on no VR for Xbox, platform head Phil Spencer was supportive for Facebook’s ambition. “As it relates to VR specifically, the best experience that I’ve seen is Quest 2 and I just think its untethered [and] ease of use in its capability just doesn’t to me require it being connected to an Xbox in any way.”

In a new development published by Meta this week, it is forming a new Meta Horizon OS initiative which gives third-party firms access to its hardware to ‘build a next-generation computing platform,” but it is not clarified on what this new approach will offer truly as of yet.

This new hardware ecosystem will run on Meta Horizon OS, the mixed reality operating system that powers our Meta Quest headsets. We chose this name to reflect our vision of a computing platform built around people and connection—and the shared social fabric that makes this possible. Meta Horizon OS combines the core technologies powering today’s mixed reality experiences with a suite of features that put social presence at the center of the platform.

Meta Horizon OS is the result of a decade of work by Meta to build a next-generation computing platform. To pioneer standalone headsets, we developed technologies like inside-out tracking, and for more natural interaction systems and social presence, we developed eye, face, hand, and body tracking. For mixed reality, we built a full stack of technologies for blending the digital and physical worlds, including high-resolution Passthrough, Scene Understanding, and Spatial Anchors. This long-term investment that began on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project has produced a full mixed reality operating system used by millions of people.

Developers and creators can take advantage of all these technologies using the custom frameworks and tooling we’ve built for creating mixed reality experiences, and they can reach their communities and grow their businesses through the content discovery and monetization platforms built into the OS. These include the Meta Quest Store, which contains the world’s best library of immersive apps and experiences—we’re renaming it to the Meta Horizon Store.

“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 specialized hardware. 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 specialized products, all running on a common platform.”

When speaking on its partnership with Microsoft, Meta writes: “Xbox and Meta teamed up last year to bring Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) to Meta Quest, letting people play Xbox games on a large 2D virtual screen in mixed reality. Now, we’re working together again to create a limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox.” The post does not elaborate if it will be a native headset to play Xbox games or just an extension of the established cloud streaming deal.

What are your thoughts on the new Meta Horizon OS?

Source: Meta