Meta makes Horizon OS available to third parties, the first will be Asus and Lenovo – SMARTmania.cz

• Meta makes its Horizon OS, designed for VR headsets, available to third parties
• Asus and Lenovo will be the first to use it
• Devices with this OS will run on Qualcomm chips

For a long time, if a company wanted to release its VR headset, it was forced to create its own operating system for it, unless you count the universal Google Cardboard. Of course, this cost a lot of effort and could even discourage some manufacturers.

Perhaps, however, a change will now occur and the market for VR headsets will be more similar to, for example, that of smart watches. Some companies, led by Apple, will develop their own operating system, others will be able to rely on already functioning ones and thus be able to focus on other things.

Horizon OS for everyone

And the company that will offer this operating system could be Meta. It has now announced that it has decided to make its Horizon operating system, which powers its Oculus headsets, available to third parties.

Asus and Lenovo should be the first companies to use Horizon OS in their upcoming VR headsets. The one from Asus should be aimed at gamers, which will be highlighted by Asus’ signature ROG branding, while Lenovo will be developing a mixed reality device for this purpose, according to the official press release “for fun, learning and productivity“.

The meta strongly suggests that these devices will run on Qualcomm’s chipset, as is the case with its Quest 3, although it doesn’t say so directly. A limited edition will also be available “Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox,” which was jointly developed by teams from Meta and Xbox.

Many changes and renaming

With this decision also comes a number of accompanying changes. For example, the Meta Quest store has been renamed the Meta Horizon Store to better match the OS name. Likewise, the companion mobile application Meta Quest will be renamed Meta Horizon.

Zuckerberg’s company is also reportedly working to remove barriers between the Meta Horizon Store and App Lab, allowing any developer who meets the basic requirements to ship software for the platform. In addition, it is also said to be preparing a new framework for spatial applications, which should make the work of developers easier.

An opportunity for Google?

Furthermore, Meta claims to support the arrival of the Google Play 2D app store to Horizon OS, where it can then function as it does on other platforms. However, it is not yet known whether Google will accept this challenge.

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It’s clear that Meta wants to seize the opportunity with virtual reality and become to headsets what Windows is to PCs and Android is to smartphones. But whether she will succeed is still in the stars.