Mark Zuckerberg posted a video on his personal Facebook page demonstrating his company's "high-end" virtual reality (VR) headset, which has been codenamed Project Cambria.
The hardware itself was pixelated in the video, but it features two minutes of footage of its mixed reality experience.
The headset is capable of high-end resolution and full-colour passthrough so users can interact with virtual objects that are overlaid onto their real-life environments. It has been developed with Meta's Presence Platform, which the company introduced at the end of last year. For context, current Quest headsets can only display passthrough content in shades of grey.
Most of Zuckerberg's clip shows the Meta CEO gesturing and interacting with cartoon characters or painting his environment in bright colours. There's also a brief moment where he flips through floating Facebook pages to demonstrate a virtual workstation which he uses in tandem with a physical notepad and pen.
Alongside Zukerberg's post, Meta also published a video on YouTube, highlighting its Presence Platform and the difference between Quest and Cambria headsets. In both promotional videos, developers are invited to build apps and integrations for the platform, which will eventually be used in the advanced VR headsets.
"I want to share a little about Project Cambria," Zuckerberg says in the video. "Now I'm not going to show you the headset, yet, but you're looking at an experience called 'the World Beyond'."
Zuckerberg added the World Beyond will be available in the App Lab for developers to try out soon. Project Cambria is just one of several VR headsets Meta plans to introduce over the next few years, with Cambria specifically set to come out "later this year", according to Zuckerberg.
The pixelated headset also bears a resemblance to Microsoft's HoloLens mixed reality headset, which has found a niche in certain industries. Although Meta's Project Cambria appears more geared towards consumers, or even people working from home, developers may well build apps suited to specific business use cases in future.
The video leaves a number of further questions unanswered, with no details for its precise launch date or price. Recent reports speculated that it would cost around $800, though Meta has confirmed that Project Cambria will be priced "significantly higher".
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