Meta has announced that it’s opening up the Horizon OS powering its Oculus headsets to third parties. The first companies to use Horizon OS in new headsets will be Asus and Lenovo. The Asus headset will be ROG branded and will be aimed at gamers, while Lenovo will “develop mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment”, according to the official press release on the matter.
Meta strongly hints at the fact that these devices will be using Qualcomm chipsets just like it did for the Quest 3, while not directly saying it. There will also be a limited-edition “Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox” co-developed by Meta and the Xbox team.
The Meta Quest store has been renamed Meta Horizon Store, to better align with the name of the OS. The Meta Quest mobile companion app will be renamed Meta Horizon too.
Meta is also “beginning the process of removing the barriers between the Meta Horizon Store and App Lab”, which lets any developer who meets basic technical and content requirements ship software on the platform. App Lab titles will soon live in a dedicated section of the Horizon Store.
Meta says it encourages the Google Play 2D app store to come to the Horizon OS, “where it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms”. Whether Google will accept this invite or not remains to be seen.
Finally, Meta is developing a new spatial app framework that will help mobile developers “create mixed reality experiences”. They will be able to “use the tools they’re already familiar with” to bring their mobile apps to Horizon OS or to create entirely new mixed reality apps.
With this announcement, it’s pretty clear that Meta wants Horizon OS to be for AR/VR/MR headsets what Windows is to computers and Android is to smartphones – the platform that’s open to all hardware device makers.
