Meta Horizon OS
Official blog post: https://about.fb.com/news/2024/04/introducing-our-open-mixed...
Short video from Zuckerberg: https://twitter.com/NathieVR/status/1782436898654273981
This is an interesting move and feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But this isn't open source. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the store. Maybe there's an app revenue share involved?
Wait, at the end of the video he says "We're also as part of this going to be opening up our store to give you even more options to use whatever experiences you want. So whether they're on Steam, Xbox Cloud Gaming, our own App Lab, or even Google Play, if they're up for it." The blog post doesn't mention Steam or Google Play. It's not really clear what that means. Will they allow Steam to sell native Quest apps?
Edit: There's a better blog post that has more detail. https://www.meta.com/blog/quest/meta-horizon-os-open-hardwar... This one seems to suggest that being "open" to Steam just means allowing game streaming which they already do, while being "open" to Google Play means that they would allow Google to install the actual Play Store app on the headset, for 2D apps only. But Google doesn't want to. In any case it seems like they would specifically not be open to alternative app stores selling native 3D apps directly on the headset itself.
Not personally interested in an OS from Meta - the only thing I use from Meta is WhatsApp, and that's just because it is difficult to replace here in central Europe.
I don't get excited about new OSs unless they're FOSS. It sounds like an ideological take, but it's not: When an OS is not FOSS, they either succumb to the wrong incentives and lack of care (Windows) or just become a walled garden (MacOS). From what I've seen from, say, Visual Studio Code (FOSS version), or Chromium, or other such projects, is that a large company open-sourcing the core of their product can only yield positives over the alternative (fully closed) solution.
Fully FOSS would be sick, partially would be useful. Closed and ad-ridden, driven by wrong incentives and run by a company with zero sense for privacy (see their Facebook product) and a love for hype (see their AI and Metaverse products that just about nobody wanted?), I don't see this becoming very popular.
Meta has a lot of work to do on DevEx for non-gaming experiences. Say what you want with the Vision Pro, but it comes with a lot of niceities like SwiftUI. When you develop with the Quest, you're stuck with Unity or Unreal Engine -- it's almost too much freedom to develop simple productivity apps.
As usual I get quite hopeful when I hear about a new operating system. We so absolutely need paths to move away from what we have today.
I didn't even know what "mixed reality operating system" was so that made me hopeful. May include some nifty quantum processing.
Alas, it is just stuff built on top of Android, which is built on top of the Linux kernel.
Perhaps "Meta Horizon SDK for Android" would be a better label?`
If hardware manufacturers actually wanted this, Meta would be announcing a licensing deal.
This is a threat to Apple: if Apple doesn't relent on advertising/privacy in VisionOS, then Meta will do to VR what Google did for smartphone's: sell the market to maintain advertising access.
Meta doesn't care about money or mindshare on VR. They just want ad access.
> And we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms.
It sounds like they are specifically not open to third party app stores selling native AR/VR ("3D") apps. I can see why Google might not want to participate if they're not allowed to compete.
This feels like a response to complaints that Meta is hypocritical when complaining about closed platforms while running one themselves. But they aren't open sourcing the OS. I don't know why any OEMs would want to compete with Meta's hardware subsidized by app store revenue when they continue to own the exclusive store for native AR/VR apps. Maybe there's an app revenue share to sweeten the deal for hardware partners?
Joel Spolsky's "Commoditize your Complements" [0] seems relevant here. From that perspective, it seems like Meta is trying to commoditize the hardware and monopolize the OS (and likely the app store and payment system), similar to Android.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
This is awesome, I'm waiting for a VR manufacturer to add an HDMI input. Then I could use it as a monitor without jumping through a bunch of hoops.
> “Meta Horizon OS devices will also use the same mobile companion app that Meta Quest owners use today—we’ll rename this as the Meta Horizon app.”
Churning through so many VR brands. The app that used to be called Oculus and is now called Meta Quest will soon be called Meta Horizon.
If Meta really believes in the Metaverse, why do they need the Horizon brand? Why not just the Meta OS?
'Pivot to software' has been done several times in computing history: Go Corporation, SGI, Sun, Blackberry, Palm, Sega, and oh, NeXT. These are interesting precedents. I don't know of a 'pivot to software' that actually worked (NeXT ended up going back to hardware, thanks to the reverse acquisition!)
There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.
So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to. Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?
Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.
That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.
I wonder if this "opening" of the operating system is their way of putting the metaverse project out to pasture - analogous to donating it to the Apache Foundation - without admitting that the company burned $36 billion on a misadventure.
While good, Meta is likely to attempt to form a walled-garden in the vein of IOS and even Android to an extent. What I’d really hope for is a general-purpose computing platform with root access for the user, As I believe that mixed reality headsets have the potential to overtake both the smartphone and the PC as the default compute device of choice.
Is it based on some prior art (BSD, Linux...), or a new proprietary OS written from scratch? The post is not too rich in actual information, beside that now other tech-giants can use it too...
Feels like Microsoft just tried this with their own VR ecosystem not too long ago and it fell flat on its face.
I would really love to see proper educational content from Meta but i bet this is not were the 'next money thing' is.
Imagine a catalog of proper real life skills you can actually train reasonable good:
- cooking - soldering - welding - Tons of woodworking things - ...
You could also go to a lot of makers of tools and offer them to digitalize their products for them so someone can actually exercise with a cheap to super high end machine like specific CNCs or table saws etc.
>And we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms.
Did they get told to shove it by Google when they asked through back channels? To even come out and essentially say publicly "they can still get their 30% cut" is just wild to me.
Also of note, they don't mention any license. Is the hope they can avoid the Google antitrust concerns Google is running into that Apple is somehow avoiding?
Quite dislike Quest 2 dependency on Meta, would probably never buy their hardware again.
"Open" in the same way Android is, with complete control and app store by Meta. I think we have to accept that an 'open hardware platform' the way PCs were was an anomaly. We will never have anything like that again.
I wonder if this will allow full use of Meta's hardware without an account.
Is this ‘open’ as in ‘we have partners’ or actual open source?
> OS by Horizon by Meta Horizon OS by Meta.
Why not just call it Horizon OS?
This all looks incredibly lonely.
This seems like a great move. Similar to existing Android ecosystem, If this ends up making standardization of AR/VR, meta benefits from being the tone setter just as Google for Android. I wonder if the Qualcomm lock-in would stay or Mediatek and others would also onboard.
The biggest test is how much current partners (Asus, Lenovo, etc) will sell. This will verdict the future of this idea.
"we encourage the Google Play 2D app store to come to Meta Horizon OS, where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms." - I feel like this might be the rub of this. Google is way behind in building the android of spatial computing, and maybe this can play into the trust busting cases where meta can show Google not playing fair?
I don't care what these people do, I'll never use one of their products unless it is to literally save someone's life.
This entire thing is newspeak. Every headline means the opposite. For example, "A More Open App Ecosystem" means a more closed application ecosystem. By switching to a proprietary OS and setting up a walled garden where they have to approve all software you can run. This is part of the coming war on general computation.
I remember when Facebook released an "OS" for the phone (it was really just a skin for Android). While I'm really happy to see that FB is making another stab into the field with the Quest, and I'm very happy that we're finally getting some real development in VR, I'm even more skeptical of them now as I was then: I just don't trust FB with my data.
Part of what makes me so skeptical is how "cheap" the Quest 3 is. There's no way they're not loosing [literally billions](https://fortune.com/2023/10/27/mark-zuckerberg-net-worth-met...) of dollars developing VR tech and, given their track record, only have one way they know to make that money back.
I know I'm fighting the overwhelming tide here, but what the hell is "mixed reality"? What is "the metaverse"? For that matter what is "artificial intelligence"? Stop trying to dazzle and just use words, if the technology is revolutionary then it will be. An automobile is not the magic carpet, a cell phone is not a soulmate, etc. Otherwise fuck it -- TV is virtual reality, getting high augmented reality, TI-84 calculators are artificial intelligence, libraries are the metaverse, ...
This is interesting, hopefully it gets more HMD options out there, but even better get more developers making ar/vr games.
Was the OS a limiting factor in any of this, though? I've only used a Vive and my Oculus 2 and 3 so I'm not sure what other HMDs use, I assumed some Android distro that just connects to steamvr/openxr/whatever.
Are Asus, Lenovo and Xbox really trying to get into the vr/ar ecosystem? Are they going to be Oculus clones? Their own r&d? Is this all a pipedream?
Subtitled "Not an actual product render."
This is actually a really cool move. Not sure about the business case, but building an os for AR/VR is challenging. A naive port of Android or Linux will not really work (without inducing massive motion sickness). Having a framework that allows a hardware oem to quickly create a decent AR/VR headset could really open up the market.
A new OS will be interesting ONLY if Meta commits to certain policies that Microsoft and Apple have violated. Users should be able to use their devices without any telemetry or phoning home. They should be able to install any software they want from any source. They should not be forced to make payments only through Meta’s services. Etc.
I won't touch VR/AR until the technology progresses to the point where its nealry indistinguishable from regular sunglasses/eye-glasses.
I have yet to use any VR device that made me want to purchase it, its all felt insanely gimmicky, so far the only time a headset seems nice is on a plane ride.
I can see the potential, still seems a long way off imo.
> We’re also developing a new spatial app framework that helps mobile developers create mixed reality experiences. Developers will be able to use the tools they’re already familiar with to bring their mobile apps to Meta Horizon OS or to create entirely new mixed reality apps.
Like porting my whole android app + spatial features or...?
That's a poor name for an operating system, especially in the UK.
Google Horizon Post master drama or watch the TV series.
It’s funny that Horizon is named after Horizon in the Amazon Prime TV series “Upload”. Good TV series btw.
That's a bad name collision, "Horizon" is the name of the OS on the Nintendo 3ds and switch.
Somewhat surprised to not see Valve in there, especially after Steam Link showed up a handful months ago.
Did they consider the UK market when naming this?
Horizon is synonymous with a computing scandal involving buggy IT code.
It's going to be interesting if Google/Samsung will win out or Meta/etc.
I think linux would be the obvious choice.
VR is being gatekept by Valve and Meta.
How likely is Valve to use Android?
For all those who feel insufficiently tracked by Google. If it has a browser, you might be able to run the JavaScript implementation of Android on top of it, thus being double-tracked.
Has anyone actually tried the Metaverse yet?
As I understood it, this was basically a massively expensive failed experiment so far. No-one is using it for reals (yet?).
Who's the market for developing apps for it?
Android tried it and the results were closed-source fiefdoms and crappy hardware.
There's not a big enough market for this to sustain itself because VR is a flying car category that no one needs.
The most interesting thing about this is that everyone just forgot all the anger about the spying from a few years ago during the Cambridge analytica thing. Did that just go away?
Sounds like MS ditching Windows MR has left an opportunity in the market for Meta. The OEMs listed all previously made MR headsets and presumably needed a new solution.
FOSS everything or go home. I am not buying into closed VR ecosystem. Not Apple, not Meta, not anything else that is trying to lock me in.
Meta is smartly capturing the MR developer market like they captured the web developer market with React.
In terms of Vision vs Quest - I wonder if there will be a "React Native" parallel that allows developers to write React for both Vision and Quest apps. A lot of the developer market comes down to languages: Python for AI/ML, Obj-C (Swift) for iOS, Java (Kotlin) for Android - but JavaScript always seems to weasle its way into these native platforms and a lot of companies end up just writing React for anything front-end.
It's gonna be a live service OS, like Windows, with subscriptions, fees, and developer restrictions.
What VR needs is a VR OpenBSD.
How does this compare to Microsoft's and Apple's? Is there any other player in AR/VR/MR OS?
Almost exciting, if the software wasn't just this shitty hacked together proprietary android fork. It's just an app store and game launcher, there is nothing there that I would imagine a metaverse operating system to be, like interoperability between vr apps. This would have to be built from the ground up around the VR paradigm on open standards and hackable.
If the Internet started on today's proprietary app stores and nailed-shut operating systems it would've never innovated this quickly. This is what AOL/MSN desperately attempted, but it all failed (thank god).
Meta's dream of the metaverse is nothing but laughable, hold back by nothing but terrible software.
Not too surprising given how Google has been closing down their Android platform to Meta for a while now
Notable by it's absence: ML/AI
I hope at some point they expand to devices beyond goggles, like i dont know a holodeck or something
I have a bad feeling that this will break modded beat saber on quest once again :/
Never wished something would quickly fail already at its announcement as much as this.
This will (thankfully) fail because meta will not be able to harness the chinese industrial firehose because 1. US protectionism 2. chinese people are not stupid, they won't let a company whose business model revolves around selling attention, acquire a monoply on attention of human beings
With this and Llama I'm starting to wonder if Meta is making a pivot toward openness similar to what Microsoft did under Nadella.
It's not altruism of course. It's a strategy. But it's a different strategy from the closed pure walled garden strategy they have executed previously.
This sounds like a good idea. Love him or hate him, Zuck knows how to ship.
Are there really "millions of people" using it?
With this and Llama, looks like Zuck is trying to be the Linux of whatever the next big wave is
Unless I have the ability to inspect source code of "Meta Horizon OS". No way in hell am I touching anything from this company.
I wonder what types of telemetry garbage is embedded into the OS.
Meta playing 3d chess here. Opening up the OS to other hardware providers is a great strategic move imo. Excited to see what innovations other hardware manufactures add.
It's nonsense. They're claiming to be "open" but it's all still vendor controlled proprietary nonsense.
If they really want to be the dominant VR winner, then release it all under GPLv3+ and let us all get to innovate together.
feels like US tech companies are running on fumes
just as the AI bubble starts to fizzle its one last push at AR
While the web trends away from open, Facebook is zigging where others are zagging and supporting the resistance technology-wise.
Imagine being banned from Facebook due to not complying with the community guidelines and being unable to use your computer.
Community guidelines that can change at any moment at any time and are enforced by random people who can make mistakes.
A Facebook OS as a daily driver is an idea that is vomitive in every way.
Imagine ads that track you eyes and that you cannot look away from. Ads that track your face muscles so they know exactly how you react to them. Like being connected to a lie detector 24/7.
This is pure evil, everyone should reject this.
fyi I’m working on a GPLv3 competitor and intend to outshine whatever this is
Isn’t it built on Android?
Hot take of the day: googles don't need a separate OS. Abandon the sell-at-loss-to-recover-on-games model, open up the hardware and we'll talk.
I've got to hand it to Zuckerberg : when he spouted the "open" vs "closed" rhetoric earlier in the year, I said it was nice words but meaningless unless he put his money where his mouth was and makes Quest OS available to others as well as put firm guarantees around side loading etc. But in the same breath I said I doubted he would do that. And now he has done exactly that. However much antipathy people have towards him and his past, he keeps putting meat behind his words and actually doing the things he says.
At the same time, important to recognise here that this is still to some extent "open washing" what is a totally controlled OS. This is not like AOSP where you can go download the source code and compile it yourself. So far it is not even like Windows where you can download an installer and run it on a computer yourself. A manufacturer will have to form a business partnership with Meta to even get access to this "open" OS - I assume. But since I keep under estimating Zuckerberg maybe he will exceed my expectations on that front too.
Nonetheless, this is a huge step forward and a genuine challenge now for Google/Samsung. The bar is now very very high for them to deliver something compelling enough that manufacturers will jump on board instead of building on Horizon OS with an existing install base of 25M+ users and thousands of apps.
All up, this is pretty exciting news in the XR space and really sets the stage for an epic battle in the next couple of years as these platforms go head to head.
>And we encourage the Google Play 2D
They just had to stick that 2D in there. Yes, poke the bear.
not sure Horizon is a great name for a software project
i love rivals on tech, hope like ios vs android
Funny what they call an OS nowadays. I'd say it's another Linux distribution.
More "awesome tech" from Meta that few people will ever use. If you do, just be careful they don't share your location with any genocidal occupiers!
pivoting some underlying metaverse tech? scant on detail unfortunately
"Open platform" my ass. I still have to jump through ridiculous hoops to mod BeatSaber (which is the only way to make it worth playing for more than a few minutes). Quest 3 makes modding even harder. This announcement is trying to frame App Lab as an open app distribution platform; it isn't. Those "basic technical and content requirements" apps have to meet are basically the same ones that Apple or Google or Meta themselves enforce for their app stores. Entire classes of applications, particularly those that undermine platform-owners' business models are not allowed.
Additionally, Horizon is generally a terrible operating system. Useless and intrusive "social" features out the wazoo, laden with tracking/spyware, and it isn't even good for anything beyond launching apps that take over the whole environment. Want to use your fancy headset to open up apps in 3d space and do some multitaking work? Well I sure hope you're happy with exactly 3 2d apps (all equally sized) lined up in a row in a fixed location, because that's all you're getting. If you want to do anything real you need to install an app that launches its own environment for multitasking, but of course then you can only pull in windows from a remote PC, so if you want to run any local applications it's back to basics for you. Oh, and of course you can't mix those remote PC windows with local apps. As poor as Apple's Vision OS is in the multitasking department Horizon falls far behind even it.
Very strange how many people are here to dunk on Zuck. He's opening up an OS. THAT'S AWESOME! We should celebrate that in principle, no matter how we feel about him or VR in general.
Dude they already have a new grift, AI, why are they still pouring money in this failed project? Zuckerberg is trying so hard to not be Elon 2.0
great, another Android.
Am I the only weirdo who does not want, under any circumstance, to move to a world where head-mounted computer systems are normal? It's bad enough we have the things in our pockets. I don't want mine mounted in front of my eyes.
I can hear the replies already, "If you don't want one, don't use one," but if something becomes normal enough, the outside world does change around it. Why invest in street signs, for example? Who prints maps or encyclopedias now? Or why make anything actually aesthetically pleasing if 98% of the people who are going to interact with it will see it through a digital lens, where you can change your designs on the fly and for so much less cost?
It's not just that I don't want to use it. I don't want it to become normal among other people either.
I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the upside-down language that Meta is trying to execute here with the repeated use of 'open' to describe any of this. This is an invitation for other corporations to drink from their social spigot and join their walled-off app store. The word 'open' really is under multiple fronts of diffusionary attack lately.
Is the Overton Window now a mobius strip?
Doesn’t seem very “open” actually. Open to ASUS and Lenovo != Open.
Wow that spam bot is quite creative! Looks like they've figured out how to create a green account, and perhaps bypassing the spam detection by having each new account only post one spam message.
I'm sure dang is really busy right now.
I was hoping to open this and see screenshots of what the OS looked like—I have never had a sense of what the OS for Meta's headsets is, only what individual games look like.
Instead, we get five (5) "Not an actual product render" illustrations.
The bridge to nowhere doesn't need more features, it needs a somewhere
> Not an actual product render.
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At least I can build VR apps for free on Meta Quest with Unity, as opposed to 200$ a month with Apple Vision Pro.
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Are you lonely? Do u want an AI girlfriend? https://discord.gg/candyai yWhiZxRAvAYJyMZSV
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Does this page even load for y'all in Firefox? For me CORS protection blocks the whole site from loading.
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I don't think anyone cares.
Otherwise known as Linux.
Shades of Apple licensing the Mac OS to clone hardware vendors in 1995 - 1997. It seems like Meta will be controlling the software experience quite closely, just like Apple did back in the day.
There’s an important difference though: Apple made all their money on Mac hardware margins which the nimble clone vendors could undercut. Whereas for Meta, the Quest hardware has always been sold at breakeven or even as a loss leader (a few years ago they actually raised the price of the Quest 2 to cut further losses).
So there’s no kind of existential danger to Quest here, but it remains to be seen if the hardware licensees can bring anything relevant to the table either.