The popular programming resource’s first foray into the hardware market, ‘The Key’, apparently found a niche in the market, selling over 10,000 units despite having only three keys, “Ctrl, C, and V”.
The joke referenced the longstanding stereotype of programmers boosting their productivity by merely copy and pasting lines of code from online resources such as Stack Overflow.
What do buyers get?
The new product, now available on Drop for $29, still only has three customizable keys out the box.
However, unlike the original, The Key V2.0 is hot-swappable - which means you can change out its switches without soldering them.
If users want to further customize the keyboard's look, they can now play with their colour settings via the hardware's RGB lighting.
In addition, Stack Overflow V2.0’s acrylic case will apparently help user’s color schemes shine through.
The new piece of kit is also equipped with custom XDA profile keycaps sporting the Stack Overflow logo.
A portion of all proceeds from the sale are set to go to digitalundivided, a US-based charity for female black and Latino entrepreneurs.
The Key V2.0 is available to purchase now with an available date of July 20, 2022, with 3,900 pieces initially up for grabs.
“Remember, good artists copy, great artists steal, greatest artists copy, then paste,” said a Stack Overflow spokesperson.
Stack Overflow continues to be big business, as the company was acquired by Amsterdam-based tech investment firm Prosus NV in a deal valued at $1.8 billion back in June 2021.
A misconfiguration in Google Cloud Platform has been found which could give threat actors full control over a target virtual machine (VM) endpoint, researchers have said.
In a blog post published by cloud incident response experts Mitiga, the company noted that by (ab)using legitimate system features, potential attackers could read and write data from VMs which could, in theory, result in a complete system takeover.
Mitiga, however, stresses that this is not a vulnerability, or system error - it’s described as a “dangerous functionality”.
Mitiga notes that threat actors could use an exposed metadata API, named “getSerialPortOutput”, which usually tracks and reads locks on serial ports.
The researchers described the API call as a “legacy method of debugging systems”, as serial ports are not ports in the TCP/UP sense, but rather files of the form /dev/ttySX, given that this is Linux.
"We at Mitiga believe that this misconfiguration is likely common enough to warrant concern; however, with proper access control to the GCP environment there is no exploitable flaw," the report reads.
After disclosing the findings to Google, the company agreed the misconfiguration could be used to bypass firewall settings. Mitiga suggested Google change two things in the getSerialPortOutput function - restrict its use only to accounts with high permissions, and allow firms to disable any addition or alteration of Compute VM metadata at runtime.
Furthermore, the company recommended Google revise its GCP documentation, to further clarify that firewalls and other network access controls don’t fully restrict access to VMs.
Google only partially agreed: "After a long exchange, Google did ultimately concur that certain portions of their documentation could be made clearer and agreed to make changes to documentation that indicated the control plane can access VMs regardless of firewall settings. Google did not acknowledge the other recommendations nor speak to specifics regarding whether a GCP user could evade charges by using the getSerialPortOutput method," the report states.
Blizzard has released a new patch for the Overwatch 2 beta, nerfing strong characters and buffing weaker ones. On top of that, Zenyatta has gotten a new, experimental ability.
In the patch, which is now live, a multitude of changes and fixes have been made to try and shake up the current Overwatch 2 beta. The most drastic change is almost certainly coming to Zenyatta, who is getting a whole new ability.
He now has a new passive, which should make him a little harder to get close to, giving him much-needed survivability. His new passive, ‘Snap Kick’, increases his melee damage by 50% and significantly increases its knockback. This allows him to get enemies out of his face, and a more powerful melee makes him particularly dangerous to dive characters like Tracer who will now fear getting too close.
In the patch notes, the developers explained: “Zenyatta has trouble fighting at close range, so he was at a disadvantage if an enemy flanked or jumped on top of him. His new passive, Snap Kick, will help him create space and put enemies at his fighting range.”
“We think this new passive will be a fun adjustment to his kit, but we also want this change to acknowledge community concerns. We understand 5v5 has made support heroes feel more vulnerable, and we wanted to give Zenyatta tools to help create space between him and enemies.”
On top of this, Zenyatta’s base shields are increased from 150 to 175 to give him more health.
Balance changes and bug fixes
Elsewhere, Wrecking Ball is returning from a short stint out of Overwatch 2 due to his ability to kick out every other player in the game. On top of that, he returns with a buff, increasing his knockback by 36% which should allow him to displace the enemy team more.
Soldier 76, arguably the best Damage hero in the game, is seeing pretty big nerfs, too, in an effort to bring him back in line with the rest of the roster. His bullets now do 18 damage rather than 20 and his Sprint has seen a 10% speed decrease.
He has gotten a little help in the form of buffs to his Ultimate, however. Tactical Visor now allows for critical hits and no longer removes damage falloff from his Heavy Pulse Rifle.
There are also quality of life changes, such as fixes to the kill feed not showing the correct information or health packs missing timers.
While this is just a balancing patch for the beta, it's exciting to see a patch just a week after the beta’s launch. Blizzard’s cadence of communications and action thus far is encouraging, especially with two years of near radio silence just past us. If this level of engagement continues, players will certainly feel their concerns are being heard.
2.0.8.2 Tech Beta 1 Patch Notes
Here's a full list of the patch notes:
BUG FIXES
General
Fixed a bug where the "Thank you for reporting" message would not clear
Fixed a bug where names in the friends list would appear alphabetically regardless of game status
Fixed a bug where heroes that killed themselves would show incorrectly in the kill feed
Fixed a bug where health packs would sometimes be missing timers
Fixed a bug where Reaper would sometimes be auto selected on hero select
Fixed a bug where the control progress bar would sometimes be the wrong color
Made several adjustments to sound volume and mix
Fixed several crashes
Heroes
Wrecking Ball
Fixed a bug where Wrecking Ball could crash other players
Doomfist
Fixed a bug where Melee attacks would not deal damage to Doomfist during Power Block
Roadhog
Fixed a bug where Roadhog's hook cooldown would start on return instead of cast
Soldier 76
Fixed a bug where Soldier's Heavy Pulse Rifle might snap awkwardly during Tactical Visor
Fixed a bug when Soldier 76 would have a slanted UI when wearing his Ugly Sweater skin
Symmetra
Fixed a bug where shooting Symmetra's turrets into the horizon would cause turrets to be unusable
Hanzo
Fixed a bug where Hanzo's White Wolf skin would appear invisible
Brigitte
Fixed a bug where Brigitte's shield did not block damage from above
Ana
Fixed a bug where using Nano Boost on Doomfist would overwrite his damage reduction
Lucio
Fixed a bug where Sonic Amplifier could jam and not reload
Maps
Midtown
Adjusted some geometry on top of the train to prevent players from staying there indefinitely
Colosseo
Adjusted some geometry that could be abused by players
HEROES
DAMAGE
Sojourn
Railgun Alt Fire
Projectile width increased from 0.05m to 0.1m
Power Slide
Cooldown reduced from 7 to 6 seconds
Dev Comment:
We saw a lot of players at varying skill levels struggling to land shots with her Alt Fire, so we are making the projectile width wider.
Sojourn is all about mobility, and we wanted her to move around the maps more freely. We think this will help increase her effectiveness and make her even more fun to play.
Soldier: 76
Heavy Pulse Rifle
Damage reduced from 20 to 18
Sprint
Movement speed reduced from 50 to 40%
Tactical Visor
Now allows for critical hits, if a shot would have been a critical hit without it running
No longer removes damage falloff from his Heavy Pulse Rifle
Dev Comment:
We believe Soldier 76 was over tuned during the first week of the PvP beta. He was extremely mobile with the new damage passive that increases movement speed by 10%. We brought his Sprint ability down a bit with the new passive in mind.
Soldier 76 has always been a high damage output hero, but we are seeing fewer counters to him with one less tank per team. We lowered the damage of his Heavy Pulse Rifle to fit with 5v5.
We wanted to make Tactical Visor a more interesting ultimate for players who want to push their aim skills through the ability. The point of this change isn’t purely to buff him or counterbalance the nerfs. We wanted to make Soldier 76 more fun to play while rewarding mechanical skill.
Sombra
Stealth
Movement speed reduced from 65 to 50%
Dev Comment:
After a week of testing the new damage passive, we decided to balance Sombra’s Stealth speed with the 10% movement speed increase in mind.
TANK
Roadhog
Whole Hog
This ability has changed from a ‘Channeled’ ultimate (e.g. Pharah, Reaper, Cassidy), into a ‘Transform’ ultimate (e.g. Soldier: 76, Genji, Winston). This is what that means:
The weapon no longer automatically fires, and you must press Primary Fire to use the ultimate
You can use normal abilities during Whole Hog without canceling the ultimate
Stuns will no longer cancel the ultimate
Dev Comment:
We saw Roadhog underperforming, so we are making his ultimate more interesting, effective, and fun. Roadhog was dying frequently while using Whole Hog, so we are trying to give him more options and flexibility in his ult.
Winston
Tesla Cannon
Secondary fire ammo cost reduced from 20 to 12
Dev Comment:
This change to Winston's secondary fire enables him to use it more often without sacrificing as much of his primary fire. We want his secondary fire to feel less restrictive to use and more fluid like his kit.
Wrecking Ball
Roll
Knockback increased by 36%
Dev Comment:
We are reverting Roll’s knockback to the original value from when Wrecking Ball was launched. We wanted to give Wrecking Ball a more unique role as a dive tank that can split up enemy teams. We made this change with the Tank passive of 30% knockback resistance in mind.
Zarya
Graviton Surge
Duration reduced from 4 to 3.5 seconds
Dev Comment:
There are less counters to Graviton Surge with one less tank per team and phase effects no longer escaping Zarya’s ultimate. We observed the ultimate over-performing, so this change brings it in line with 5v5 gameplay.
SUPPORT
Lucio
Crossfade
Self-healing penalty increased from 30% to 60%
Dev Comment:
Lucio had incredible survivability with Crossfade stacked with the new support role passive, so we reduced the amount it heals himself.
Baptiste
Biotic Launcher
Healing ammo increased from 10 to 13
Dev Comment:
Baptist is under-performing because teams aren’t playing as grouped up right now. Increasing his healing ammo will let him heal more targets who aren’t necessarily grouped up.
Ana
Biotic Rifle
Ammo increased from 12 to 15
Biotic Grenade
Duration reduced from 4 to 3 seconds
Dev Comment:
Ana’s Biotic Grenade was too effective with one less tank and more infrequent barriers, so we are reducing the duration of the ability. We also saw Ana using her grenade less frequently on herself because of the new support passive ability. To help compensate for her grenade, we wanted to give her power back through increasing her Biotic Rifle’s ammo.
Zenyatta
Base shields increased from 150 to 175
New Passive Added: Snap Kick
This passive increases Quick melee damage by 50% and significantly increases its knockback
Dev Comment:
Zenyatta has trouble fighting at close range, so he was at a disadvantage if an enemy flanked or jumped on top of him. His new passive, Snap Kick, will help him create space and put enemies at his fighting range.
We think this new passive will be a fun adjustment to his kit, but we also want this change to acknowledge community concerns. We understand 5v5 has made support heroes feel more vulnerable, and we wanted to give Zenyatta tools to help create space between him and enemies.
Brigitte
Shield Bash
Knockback doubled
Dev Comment:
It’s difficult to tell when Brigitte lands a Shield Bash because the impact of that ability was not easily noticeable. This is a subtle change that will make the ability feel more satisfying.
A startup called Graphite has raised a $20 million Series A funding round to scale up its open source command line interface, which is already proving popular among developers in early trials.
The tool is designed to bypass traditional bottlenecks in the code review process, by eliminating the need to wait for approval before work can continue.
“The idea with Graphite is that I make a change, and then while I look for someone to review it, I just continue to make changes on top of that, creating this queue of things to do,” co-founder Tomas Reimers told TechCrunch.
A change in direction
Led by Andreessen Horowitz and supported by a group of angel investors, the cash injection will go towards recruiting new engineers, building a desktop application, and developing integrations with existing IDEs and other tools.
When Graphite was first formed, the idea was to bring mobile development software to market, but the founders soon realized the potential in a tool they had developed for internal use only.
“We actually built the first version of Graphite as an internal tool a little over a year ago,” explained CEO Merrill Lutsky. “We’d all missed the code review workflows that we had at some of our previous companies, so we built the first version of the Graphite command line tool and the dashboard just as a tool for us to use internally.”
“The response to what became Graphite was so enthusiastic and compelling that we started to think that maybe we should work on this instead.”
After a trial period in which the company solicited feedback from the development community, and secured the blessing of the seed investors, the founders took the decision to pivot the startup to focus wholly on the command line application.
According to the website, developers working across a number of large companies - including Snowflake, Epic Games, Bolt and more - are already using the tool to ship new products and updates faster.
“Graphite is re-defining how teams think about code reviews. This is one of the spaces that has lacked innovation for a while and I am excited to see their roadmap become a reality,” said Roopak Venkatakrishnan, Engineering Director at Bolt.
The mission for Graphite in the coming months will be to roll out performance improvements and introduce an additional layer of polish - and, ultimately, to expand its 2,500-strong user base.
Developers interested in sampling the Graphite service can sign up for the waitlist here.
Better late than never, Microsoft is adding a Snapchat-like Stories feature to the Xbox app for iOS and Android.
Judging from Microsoft’s description of it, “Xbox Stories” work similarly to those on other platforms, but the content does have the distinction of lasting up to 72 hours instead of a day. This is all a part of Xbox’s big May update where it also introduced its new Quality of Service (QoS) Tagging feature.
Intense gamer Stories
In these Stories, you’ll be able to share heated gamer moments by posting in-game clips, screens, and achievements with your friends or the community at large. Stories can be replied to with either message or a quick emoji reaction, just as you would on other platforms.
Upon updating the app, you’ll see a new Stories channel right on the home screen. You can start posting stories by opening the channel and tapping the new plus symbol next to your Gamertag. Then you can select whatever you want to share, add a caption during the preview page, and hit the post button. This new feature is currently available in Australia with an eventual rollout to other regions coming soon.
Admittedly, it is strange to see Microsoft doing this. Especially when the latest trend is to rip off TikTok by having a continuous vertical video feed. A lot of other social media platforms implemented their own version of Snapchat Stories, only to discontinue the feature not long after.
Now, we just have to wait for Microsoft to make this Xbox feature global before everyone totally moves on from the Stories concept.
New priority tagging system
In the same May announcement is the QoS Tagging feature. It’s a new function that lets players set a priority tag to certain console system features that can get bogged down with latency and congestion. That way during times of high user traffic, your connection stays stable as it gets priority over others.
Things like party chat, console streaming, and multiplayer modes are given as examples of areas that will have this tagging. That said, not everyone can take full advantage of it.
According to Microsoft’s support page for QoS Tagging, your router/gateway and ISP network must support the Low Latency DOCSIS standard for it to work. Microsoft also warns there may be some connection problems anyway if you utilize the tagging.
Now, we just have to wait for Microsoft to make this Xbox feature global before everyone totally moves on from the Stories concept.
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Building on its plan to replace third-party cookies on the web, Google is bringing its new Privacy Sandbox standards to mobile to improve user privacy on Android smartphones.
For those unfamiliar, the search giant’s Privacy Sandbox initiative consists of several parts including Google Topics and FLEDGE. While Google Topics splits the web into different topics and divides users into groupings depending on their interests, FLEDGE is dedicated to facilitating remarketing or showing ads on websites based on a user’s previous browsing history.
Back in February of this year, Google announced in a blog post that Privacy Sandbox would also being coming to Android in addition to the web in order to better protect user data and privacy, saying:
“Our goal with the Privacy Sandbox on Android is to develop effective and privacy enhancing advertising solutions, where users know their information is protected, and developers and businesses have the tools to succeed on mobile. While we design, build and test these new solutions, we plan to support existing ads platform features for at least two years, and we intend to provide substantial notice ahead of any future changes.”
Privacy Sandbox on Android
To help developers prepare their apps and online services for the introduction of Privacy Sandbox on mobile, Google has now released the first developer preview for Privacy Sandbox on Android.
The Privacy Sandbox Developer Preview provides additional platform APIs and services on top of the Android 13 Beta including an SDK, system images, an emulator and developer documentation. This will allow developers to do preliminary testing of these new technologies and evaluate how they might adopt them in their apps.
Once the development environment is set up, developers can familiarize themselves with technical proposals on the SDK Runtime, Topics, Attribution Reporting and FLEDGE on Android as well as preview and run the included sample apps.
As Google plans to test Privacy Sandbox on Android over the next two years, it could be some time before end users get to experience the new set of standards for themselves. In the meantime though, you can always grab a VPN, an anonymous browser and one of the best privacy apps for Android to further protect yourself against online tracking.
For the second month in a row, Microsoft Edge has gained market share over Apple's Safari, consolidating its position as the second most popular web browser, but it is still a distant runner-up behind Google Chrome.
The new data comes courtesy of StatCounter, which tracks the market share for web browsers (among other things). In their latest report covering April, Edge ticked up from 9.65% in March to 10.07% in April, while Safari – which dropped from second to third place in March – ticked up slightly as well, from 9.56% to 9.62%.
The biggest loser is still Mozilla Firefox, which dropped from 9.47% in February to 7.57% in March, with a slight tick back up to 7.87% in April. The behemoth running roughshod over all of these, of course, is Google Chrome, which saw a solid bump from 64.91% in February to 67.29% in March, almost entirely at the expense of Firefox, before ticking down slightly in April to 66.58%.
Google Chrome looks down on the marketplace like a digital Doctor T. J. Eckleburg(Image credit: StatCounter)
Microsoft's Edge browser has made major strides in recent years to build its user base, especially after Microsoft rebuilt Edge around the Chromium framework, the same web engine that provides the foundation for Google Chrome.
This allows for a lot of the best features of Google Chrome, like extensions, to also run in Microsoft Edge, while the browser enjoys a level of system integration that Google Chrome can only envy.
There is no question that this integration into Windows 11 definitely helps prompt user adoption. Changing your default browser isn't hard, but it's also something you have to actively do, and since Windows 11 comes with Edge already set as the default browser, users, are just as likely to simply let it ride.
The adoption rate for Windows 11 has been slow, but it has been increasing. As Windows 11 adoption steadily grows, there is likely to be a baseline growth for Edge going forward, regardless of anything Microsoft does to promote it.
TechRadar has reached out to both Google and Microsoft for comment and will update this story if and when we hear back.
Fighting over Google's cookie crumbs
While the gains made by Edge are very real, these two browsers are still getting lapped several times over by Google Chrome. In many ways, the web browser market really is Google's to lose. It has a commanding lead now, but so did Intel after it introduced its Core series processors. AMD had no answer to Intel Core processors, and so saw its steadily growing market share suddenly crater to roughly 15%, down from a high in the low-to-mid 30s.
In 2017 though, AMD bounced back with its new Ryzen processors, and things began to turn around very quickly. Now, AMD is going toe-to-toe with Intel in market share and has achieved some degree of parity in the desktop processor market.
There's no reason why the same thing can't happen to Google Chrome. Edge has a few notable advantages over Chrome, namely that its memory management is simply better. We all know the consequence of opening up too many Chrome tabs. Edge simply doesn't have nearly as much of a problem in this regard (opening 200+ Edge tabs is going to tank your performance, too, obviously).
Edge's growth disappears when it comes to mobile browsers, however, and it doesn't even have enough market share on mobile to break out of the Other category on StatCounter. Here, too, Chrome dominates the market with about 63% of the global market, with Safari taking up another 25% (Safari is the default browser on iPhones). Chrome and Safari are much closer to one another on tablet market share, 47% to 38%, respectively, with Edge accounting for just 0.27%.
Even as the Redmond giant continues its push to compete with Google in the browser wars, and makes incremental gains, it's got a long slog ahead of it.
With Facebook's transformation into Meta and its embrace of the metaverse, 2022 is shaping up to be an important year for new virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) headsets. Following on the huge success of the Oculus Quest 2 will be Project Cambria, a top-of-the-line headset currently in development from Meta.
Project Cambria was first announced at the Meta Connect conference in October 2021. Dubbed "the Oculus Quest Pro" by eager fans and pundits, Project Cambria is a high-end virtual reality and augmented reality hybrid headset. This would make it distinct from the Oculus Quest 2 (and eventual Oculus Quest 3), in being aimed at for the pro and enthusiast end of the mixed-reality market.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg described it as “a completely new advanced and high-end product,” which will sit “at the higher end of the price spectrum.”
With Apple said to also be working on high-end virtual and augmented reality devices, not to mention the imminent launch of the PlayStation VR 2 headset from Sony, Meta will be looking to shore up its position across the spectrum of all things VR.
Interested? You should be. Here’s everything you need to know about Project Cambria so far.
Project Cambria: Cut to the chase
What is it? Meta's top of the line headset, the cutting edge of what’s currently possible in wireless virtual reality, unrestricted by the affordability constraints that penned in other Oculus headsets
When is it out? Meta has committed to a 2022 release for the headset.
What will it cost? A leaked internal roadmap suggests that Project Cambria will cost $799 (around £640 / AU$1,125)
Latest News
May 3: Meta’s VR hardware roadmap has leaked, giving us details about its next four headsets, including the price and specs of its next VR headset: Project Cambria.
April 29: On a recent Meta earnings call, Mark Zuckerberg said Project Cambria will focus on productivity rather than playing video games. Over time the Meta CEO hopes that it’ll replace our laptop and work setup.
April 28: The roughly 30-minute Meta Quest Gaming Showcase highlighted several exciting new Quest 2 games that are headed our way over the coming year, including Among Us VR and Cities: VR. No mention of new hardware, however.
April 15: Unofficial renders using leaked info from the supply chain may offer insight into Project Cambria's design.
April 12: Tech analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicts that Meta will soon refresh its VR headset with improved screen resolution and new mini LED displays. This newly upgraded Quest headset is slated to drop in “2H22” (the second half of 2022).
More of the latest Project Cambria tidbits ▼
Feb. 26: The company formerly known as Facebook is disbanding the team working on an all-encompassing VR and AR operating system with the name XROS. Cambria will run an Android-based OS, in other words.
Feb. 17: Full-body tracking won’t be coming to the Meta Quest 2 anytime soon according to a statement from the vice president of Meta Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth. But those leaks weren't wrong, just premature, Bosworth said. Will it come to Cambria?
Feb. 8: The most recent release of the Quest 2 Software Development Kit (SDK) – a set of tools designed to help the platform's game and app developers – includes an option for 'body tracking support'.
Oct. 28, 2021: As part of Facebook's push to introduce multiple new mixed reality products "advancing the state of the art" in years to come, Mark Zuckerberg lifted the lid on Oculus' next VR headset at Facebook Connect 2021 – Project Cambria.
Price and release date
Despite the secrecy shrouding Project Cambria, we have surprisingly detailed information about what it will cost and when the device will be available. Meta has committed to a 2022 release for the headset.
But when precisely that launch will take place is hard to pin down -- we know, we know. The original Oculus Quest launched in May of 2019, with the Oculus Quest 2 following in October 2020. That’s roughly 18 months apart; by that reckoning, May of 2022 would seem an appropriate guess.
Development timelines between products can be different, of course, and with the ongoing pandemic and supply chain issues plaguing all kinds of consumer tech products, we wouldn’t bet the house on any date.
What is guaranteed, by Zuckerberg’s own admission, is that this will be a more expensive device than the $299 / £299.99 Oculus Quest 2. And a leaked internal road map published by The Information suggests that Project Cambria will cost $799 (around £640 / AU$1,125) and will be about as powerful as a Chromebook – and it will run on Meta’s own Android-based operating system.
Hardware
Meta has been candid already about what to expect from the Project Cambria hardware, which will be markedly more advanced than any Oculus headset that came before it.
Based on the best Chromebooks you can currently buy, as well as the specs of the Meta Quest 2, it sounds like Project Cambria will have at least 8GB RAM and likely around 256 GB of storage. We’ll also likely see its processor get a boost, too. But Meta may have to design its own chip, as Qualcomm has yet to launch a follow-up to the Snapdragon XR2 that powers Meta’s Quest 2.
We’ve also previously heard that Cambria will incorporate dual mini LED displays that will likely offer a 120Hz refresh rate (to improve upon the Quest 2’s “experimental” 120Hz feature).
Unofficial renders based on "the supply chain" emerged in mid April and appear to show a forward-facing camera. It's thought that this will enable mixed reality or augmented reality support, where digital elements are overlaid over scenes in the real world.
Beyond the speeds and feeds, we know Project Cambria will be a standalone, wireless headset. That’s not to say it won’t be able to connect to a PC for PC VR experiences (or even connect wirelessly to a powerful host PC, like the Oculus Link feature), but since the end of the Oculus Rift line in 2021, Meta’s focus has purely been on cable-free (out of the box, at least) VR hardware. This will also set it apart from the upcoming PlayStation VR 2, which will not only be more of an entry-level device, but will also still need a wire to connect it to the PS5 console.
(Image credit: Meta)
Software and features
Meta was apparently working on the development of a combined AR/VR operating system -- and hit pause on it back in February, so the upcoming headset will not have a completely new software platform arriving along with it. According to the latest rumors, based on leaked internal road maps, Project Cambria will run on Meta’s own Android-based operating system.
One much-requested feature will finally get its moment in the spotlight – eye tracking. It’s an important aspect of the way humans interact with the world, and a readily-exploitable tool for developers of advanced virtual reality applications. With eye-tracking, devs have another form of user input to play with, not only letting them better understand where a user’s gaze is focused (and tailor interactive experiences appropriately), but also to take full advantage of foveated rendering.
In short, foveated rendering makes sure that the area of the display a user is focused on is displayed in the greatest possible detail, while the surrounding areas of a virtual environment aren’t shown in such high fidelity - much like how the human eye masks peripheral vision. It can be used to maximize device resource usage – pumping processing power only onto the fidelity of objects and areas that a user’s gaze is interacting with. It’s a hugely exciting part of the future-VR puzzle.
Likewise, face tracking will be on board Project Cambria. This will allow in-game avatars to mimic your facial expressions in real time, potentially even opening up accessibility functions such as lip reading. So far however, both eye tracking and facial tracking are mainly expected to be used for avatar-based features – but their potential usage could go way beyond that.
Many of these features can be seen in action in the video below – what is believed to be an orientation video for new users of the Project Cambria headset, which leaked ahead of the announcement for Project Cambria:
Project Cambria will go beyond virtual reality experiences however, and will lean ever more into the augmented reality features that are increasingly becoming available to Oculus Quest users.
Supporting this will be the introduction of high resolution color passthrough features. The Oculus Quest 2 uses an array of head-mounted cameras to present the world outside of your headset on the internal displays – primarily for safely tracking your real-world play space, in real time. But the current Quest devices can only offer a black and white view, at a relatively low resolution.
Project Cambria will make this sharper and in color, expanding the potential for augmented reality experiences. It’s not quite the same as having transparent lenses, as seen in HoloLens or the hibernating Magic Leap headsets, but Cambria's augmented reality will also benefit from the expanded field of view that internal VR lenses can currently offer over transparent alternatives.
Design
Project Cambria, while remaining a head-mounted unit, will look rather different from existing Meta hardware, thanks to the use of new lens types.
(Image credit: Meta)
These “pancake” lenses have a thinner profile, reportedly resulting from their use of mini LED panels. Sharper and cooler to run, this is expected to allow Project Cambria’s front area to be much less bulky than that of the Oculus Quest 2, boosting both comfort and resolution.
With a new industrial design afforded by the new lenses, VR data miners have been able to reconstruct what they believe Project Cambria will look like by creating 3D models from render textures. You can find them in the video above and tweet below:
If the sleuthing here points to the real product, the headset will be returning to the darker outer shell design of older Oculus devices, with considerable shaving of the depth off the frontmost element of the headset.
A more pronounced padded forehead rest could be in the cards too, as well as more padding on the rear part of the strap. In conjunction with the apparent reduced weight, these features could lead to a much more comfortable headset than the Oculus Quest 2, taking cues from the Rift S and PlayStation VR, whose front forehead rests lead to very ergonomic fits.
So what about the controllers in those renders…
Controllers
Project Cambria’s motion controllers look significantly different too. While retaining the disc-on-a-wand design the Quest controllers have popularized, you’ll note that Cambria controllers appear to be lacking the tracking ring earlier models have.
This seems to be afforded by the inclusion of infrared tracking cameras on the controllers themselves. You can see this in both the above renders and the below apparent leaked controller photos, all said to be from a Facebook / Meta Workplace video conference. (Workplace is Meta’s internal Slack / Teams solution).
(Image credit: Imgur)
Whether a prototype, or a fake, there’s definitely a correlation between the texture renders and this controller – which also suggests a white colorway may be in the cards for Project Cambria. Dropping the tracking rings would presumably lead to a lighter controller, and reduce the friction between user and VR experience. Previous firmware leaks have suggested that some form of laser-tracking system between the controllers and headset will ensure the two remain in sync and in communication.
Expect hand tracking to increasingly be the norm in VR and AR too; the tracking and processing improvements expected to be found in Project Cambria should help to make the device more accurate and comfortable in day to day use.
What about Oculus Quest 3?
Rest assured that the Oculus Quest 3, now more likely to be known as the Meta Quest 3, will still likely launch as a separate offering from Project Cambria.
Speaking with The Information, Zuckerberg stressed that the Oculus Quest line has a long life ahead of it. "We have product teams spun up now working on the next few generations of virtual reality and what Quest 3 and 4 are gonna look like," Zuckerberg stated on the podcast.
Consulting CTO John Carmack also reinforced the idea that Project Cambria represents an expansion of the line, rather than a replacement to existing devices whose price point gives them wider appeal.
“An important point here is that the ‘project Cambria’ product will *NOT* replace Quest 2; it will be sold alongside it,” Carmack said. “Quest 2 will have a long life.”
What will likely happen is that, going forward, Project Cambria will debut the most bleeding-edge VR features for enthusiasts, with those features being implemented later down the line in cheaper, successive Quest devices.
(Image credit: Beat Games)
Backwards compatibility with Quest titles
There are now thought to be as many as 10 million Oculus Quest headsets in homes around the world, and it appears Meta has no intention of alienating its existing userbase by encouraging them to re-buy their VR libraries for any eventual Project Cambria headset.
Just as Oculus Quest titles were compatible with Oculus Quest 2, Project Cambria is said to have “compatibility” with the Quest. While Meta hasn’t explicitly referred to this as “backwards compatibility,” it’s hard to understand this any other way. Certainly, the aforementioned orientation video explicitly references Beat Saber in its visuals – perhaps the most popular existing Oculus Quest title of all.
How many of the newer headset’s new features will be taken advantage of by the older software remains to be seen however, though even a more ergonomic form factor could breathe new life into old titles.
