Meta is interrupting its dream of sharing Quest’s Horizon OS with third-party headset makers

Meta says it has halted its program to share Meta Horizon OS, the mixed-reality operating system that powers its Quest headset, with third-party device makers. The program was part of the company’s transformation — the idea behind the program was to create a “new generation of hardwareThis would give VR users their choice of devices when it comes to engaging with Meta’s digital worlds.

“We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to drive the VR market,” a Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for third-party device partnerships as the category evolves.”

The news was originally reported by road to VR.

Last April, the tech giant announced that would open up Meta Horizon OS to third-party handset makers. At the time, the company said Asus, Microsoft’s Xbox and Lenovo were all working on new hardware to run the company’s software. “As we’ve seen with the PC and smartphone industries, consumers are best served by a broad hardware ecosystem that produces general-purpose computing devices and more specialized products, all running on a common platform,” the company said at the time.

Since the announcement of the affiliate program and now, there have not been many updates about it. In September, at the company’s Connect event, a Meta representative he said that Meta was still working with its business partners to push Horizon OS to more devices.

Horizon OS was designed to provide “mixed reality experiences” and communicate “social presence” through technologies such as hand, body, eye and face tracking. It started when Mark Zuckerberg he still maintained that the metaverse was the “future” of his company.

Unfortunately for Horizon and the coders working on it, Meta and its top management have seemed less and less interested in the metaverse lately as AI becomes a bigger focus for the company. Earlier this month, Bloomberg stated that the metaverse group within Reality Labs, Meta’s unit focused on VR and AR hardware, was facing potential budget cuts of up to 30%. The company then confirmed that planned to “shift some of our investment from Metaverse into AI glasses and wearables given the momentum there.”