A South Korean news outlet reports that a high-end XR headset from LG, made in partnership with Meta, will ship in the first half of next year.
The Korea Economic Daily cites "industry sources" as saying that Mark Zuckerberg will meet with the CEO of LG Electronics on Wednesday to finalize the details of the partnership. This will be Zuckerberg's first publicly-known trip to South Korea since 2014, when he visited Samsung to finalize the Gear VR smartphone-holder headset partnership.
The report comes six months after another South Korean news outlet, Maeil Business Newspaper, reported that Meta had partnered with the LG group to build future Quest Pro headsets, with the first device planned to be priced around $2000.
This wouldn't be the first time Meta has partnered with an experienced consumer electronics company for a VR headset. Samsung handled the hardware for Gear VR, Oculus Go was manufactured by Xiaomi, and Oculus Rift S was co-designed and manufactured by Lenovo. All three headsets bore both the partner company's logo and Oculus branding. It's unclear how LG's brand will be incorporated in Quest Pro 2, or whether that will even be its name.
This also isn't the only software-first Big Tech company partnering with a Korean hardware company on an XR headset. Last year Samsung announced it was building a headset with Google handling the software, which it plans to ship later this year.
The new report also claims that while Meta will handle the software of the new headset, webOS (the operating system of LG TVs) will somehow be incorporated. It's unclear what exactly this means, but it might mean the headset will essentially include a virtual LG TV. This could bring over services like Netflix, Disney+, Max, Prime Video, Apple TV+, Hulu, Paramount+, and VUDU with no extra developer effort required. While Apple Vision Pro has a strong focus on media watching and includes native apps for Disney+ and Apple TV+ as well as support for the iPad versions of platforms like Prime Video, Quest is currently sorely lacking these kind of apps. Quest has a Netflix app, but it only supports 480p streaming and doesn't support downloads, passthrough, or hand tracking.
David Heaney
The LG headset could also feature Codec Avatars, Meta's long-running research & development project aiming to revolutionize remote communication by achieving truly convincing photorealistic avatars driven in real-time by headsets with face tracking sensors. Apple's Personas have a similar goal, but are currently deep in the uncanny valley and limited to a 2D window.
With Meta reentering the segment with LG, and Google entering it with Samsung, the high-end headset market currently only served by Apple could become a three horse race next year.
