Facebook plans to release its first pair of smart glasses next year

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the social network plans to release its first pair of smart glasses next year. 

The company has partnered with Luxottica, which owns Ray-Ban, to help support different designs and styles for the upcoming glasses.

“I can’t go into full product details yet, but they’re gonna be the next step on the road to augmented reality glasses, and they look pretty good too,” Zuckerberg said at Facebook’s virtual reality and augmented reality conference on Wednesday. The event used to be known as Oculus Connect and has since been rebranded as Facebook Connect.

Facebook sees virtual reality as the next big computing platform but that vision hasn’t come to fruition yet. Virtual reality faces a number of challenges, including the price of the headsets, the content available and the design of the devices. Virtual reality immerses users in a digital environment, while augmented reality involves superimposing virtual objects onto a user’s view of the real world.

Zuckerberg said that a lot of people are spending more time in virtual reality after the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. More than 90% of people who used Quest this year hadn’t used an Oculus headset before, according to Facebook. The company hasn’t said how headsets it’s sold.

Facebook’s Oculus Quest, a VR headset that doesn’t require a PC to function, has been repeatedly sold out this year. That’s because consumer demand for the headset has increased during the coronavirus pandemic, but the outbreak has also impacted the production of hardware used in these devices.

On Wednesday, Facebook unveiled a new version of Oculus Quest that has a better processor and a higher-resolution display. The new headset, called the Oculus Quest 2, has a price tag of $299, which is $100 cheaper than its predecessor. 

Facebook purchased Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion. Zuckerberg later revealed that the social network paid another $1 billion for employee retention bonuses and other incentives as part of the deal. 

Since then, all of Oculus’ co-founders have left the company and virtual reality hasn’t taken off as quickly as expected. Oculus is No. 2 in VR headset sales, shipping 28% of last year’s estimated total, trailing behind Sony, according to data from Statista.