Porting mixed reality games from Quest to AR glasses won’t be as easy as it might seem.
On the surface, you might think that from an application’s perspective there isn’t much difference between Quest and glasses like the Orion prototype, except the way that the hardware and operating system handles adding the virtual content to the real world.
But in a new ask me anything (AMA) session on Instagram, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explained why this isn’t the case. When asked if porting games from Quest to Orion would be easy, here’s what he said:
“No, I don’t think it’s gonna be easy. Not impossible, but not easy.
I know these seem like they should be very similar, but in practice the control schemes are very different. You’re obviously not gonna have controllers. Even if you have a mixed reality title that’s using hand tracking in Quest, cool, [but] in Orion you have a much smaller hand tracking volume. It’s much more in front of you, not quite as much at rest or by your side.
And I also think that there’s probably more substantial differences, also the compute envelope is 10x smaller.
You don’t have access to the virtualized scene graph construct. There’s a lot of differences there.
I don’t think it’s impossible. I think there are titles that can certainly work in both places. I think it’d be delightful to play Cubism on Orion, for example. But I just think there’s going to be a little bit of work and thought that’s going to have to go into it from the developers.”
The revelation that Orion has 10x less computing power than a Quest 3 is particularly interesting. Orion uses a wireless compute puck for rendering, allowing the glasses to be much thinner and lighter than if this were done onboard.
Some in the industry speculated that Orion’s puck may provide similar computing power to what a Quest headset has. But while a headset is able to exhale hot air out of vents into open air, Orion’s puck was designed to be pocketed or left buried in a bag, where thermal conditions could be much less forgiving. To avoid the puck feeling hot against your leg (or the nightmare scenario of burning you), Meta may have tuned the clock speeds for much lower performance than what’s theoretically possible.
Why Orion Doesn’t Mean Apple Vision Pro Was A Mistake
Here’s why, contrary to the hot takes, Meta’s Orion AR glasses prototype doesn’t render headset lines like Apple Vision and Quest obsolete.
This comes as yet another reality check on how glasses cannot and will not be a replacement for headsets (they’ll be a separate form factor). As well as offering a much wider field of view and full opacity, by the nature of their form factor headsets can also offer greater performance, much akin to the difference between your phone and your laptop.