Meta Connect event scheduled for October 11th

Meta has announced that its Connect Conference will be livestreamed on October 11th at 1PM ET / 10AM PT. In a post on the Oculus blog, the company says it’ll cover the progress it’s made on the metaverse and offer “a look at what’s to come in the near and far future.” The announcements can’t measure up to last year’s Connect, where the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta, but the company has said we’ll see information on the Horizon Worlds virtual reality app and hinted that the high-end “Project Cambria” headset will show up as well.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed the company is announcing a new VR headset in October, and on Tuesday, he backed up that idea with an image he posted to Facebook. The device he’s wearing in the photo looks very similar to what we’ve seen of Project Cambria already.

According to Zuckerberg, the headset will include eye and facial tracking and color passthrough, and it’s rumored to have a higher-res screen than what’s currently included on the Oculus Quest 2. It’s also expected to be significantly more expensive than the Quest 2, which recently got its price bumped up to $399.99.

Last month, Zuckerberg also announced that there would be details about “Major updates to Horizon and avatar graphics” announced at the Connect conference. Horizon Worlds is the company’s flagship metaverse app, which lets people create their own experiences and hang out in virtual reality (similar to programs like VRChat). Zuckerberg recently posted a screenshot of Horizon that earned a lot of ridicule — and generated a lot of memes — because of its relatively low-quality graphics. The Meta CEO responded to the memes by promising significant upgrades, which we should hear more about on October 11th.

Image: Mark Zuckerberg

The company has made a big bet that the metaverse will be the future and is spending billions of dollars a year on trying to make that happen. I suspect we’ll see it try to justify that expense at Connect, as well as try and convince the public that it should actually be paying attention to the metaverse rather than making fun of it.