When Meta Quest 3 was unveiled I was impressed with a lot of what it had to offer in both the virtual and mixed-reality departments, but by far the most interesting feature was Augments – persistent MR elements that you can use to decorate your interior. At home. As we approach the headset’s launch year, Meta’s CTO has finally explained why Augments haven’t launched yet.
In case you forgot about Augments, the concept is that they are a mix of functional and visual mixed-reality decorations. Some are just there to look nice or provide basic functions like a clock, while others act as portals to your favorite games or quick access to your favorite apps. You can see a version of it in your VR Meta Home as the little pod that First Encounters launches.
When the Quest 3 was first shown off at Meta Connect 2023 in September 2023, we saw a small glimpse of what Augments had to offer, and a promise that they would launch in the not-too-distant future. Now Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth has revealed Instagram that in January Meta ‘decided it wasn’t good enough’, and so the team decided to ‘go back to the drawing board’.
Bosworth explained that Augments felt too much like a toy instead of living up to what Meta thought it had promised and wanted to deliver. However, to improve the function, it had to start from scratch with a “completely different technical architecture.”
As a result, the feature has been postponed, and Bosworth hasn’t provided any timeline for when we might eventually see Augments in action.
With September’s Meta Connect 2024 fast approaching, there’s a slim chance we’ll see the feature there again, but I hope the next time we see Augments, Meta is actually ready for the public.
Promising too much, delivering too little
Meta is developing a worrying habit of teasing updates and hyping features that then take much longer than expected to release or don’t live up to expectations.
Augments are the latest example, but we’ve seen it take a year of rolling out virtual legs and selling the metaverse way ahead of time before it could feasibly work as described, while hardware-wise the Meta Quest Pro was a disappointment compared to more budget-friendly offerings like the Quest 3 launched not long after – with software like Batman: Arkham Shadow being released as a Quest 3 exclusive, skipping the Pro.
I think Meta is also doing a lot of exciting things in the field of XR (an umbrella term for VR, AR and MR); it recently made Horizon OS available to third-party hardware makers, and I love that it gets regular software improvements. But the flaws persist, and if they persist, it will be challenging to trust Meta’s announcements until the product is actually in people’s hands – physically or virtually.
As we move into Meta Connect 2024, I hope Meta will adopt the lessons it has learned in recent years, and as we move beyond the press conference, I would like to see the company be more open about its plans and the obstacles it faces is confronted. Setbacks can happen, but if an important part is delayed, let us know when that decision is made, rather than keeping us in the dark for months.