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Meta is dropping support for its first-gen Quest VR (virtual reality) headset. Launched under the Oculus brand in early 2019, the aging hardware will soon start losing features. The four-year-old VR headset will not be completely unusable, though.
In an email to users earlier this week, Meta said that the “Quest 1” will not get any more feature updates. Worse yet, the company will also strip off some of the existing features from the product. Users will no longer be able to create or join a party on the headset. On March 5 of this year, the device will also lose access to Meta Horizon Home social features. This essentially cuts off users from inviting others to their virtual homes or visiting someone else’s homes (via).
Meta notes that the Quest 1 will continue getting critical bug fixes and security patches at least until 2024. However, it doesn’t detail the frequency of those security updates. Long story short, the days are now numbered for the original Quest VR headset from the social media behemoth. While you can still use the headset and available apps, you won’t get the same experience. The company is taking off a host of features from it, with no new features to come.
Meta drops support for the original Quest as it readies a third-gen model
Meta is pushing the Quest 1 to its end of life as it prepares to launch a third-gen model. The Quest 3 is expected to arrive sometime this year, but details are scarce at the moment. Meanwhile, the Quest 2, which debuted in late 2020, gained some performance boost with an update last month. The company upped the GPU frequency by about seven percent, from 490 MHz to 525 MHz. Meta said developers will be able to take advantage of the faster GPU in their apps.
Since the Quest 2 features a much newer Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chipset (a 2020 processor designed specifically for AR and VR headsets), it may get longer support from Meta. The first-gen model shipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 smartphone processor from 2017. Either or both of the companies may be finding it not worth maintaining development support for this outdated chipset. It remains to be seen whether the Quest 3 gets a processor upgrade this year.
Meta launched the Quest Pro VR headset geared towards professional use in October last year. Priced at a whopping $1,500, this hardware has Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 1 chipset under the hood. There’s little hope of Meta shipping the Quest 3 with this processor. After all, the upcoming VR headset will be an affordable model priced at around $500. We will let you know as soon as we have more information.