Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: Meta’s new VR Glasses, and YouTube’s custom feeds.

“This display was built for cinema.”

When Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth demonstrated the company’s new VR Glasses at its Connect conference yesterday afternoon, you might have thought he was talking about a new smart TV. “This is the first-ever IMAX Enhanced certified VR device,” Bosworth told the audience right out of the gate while donning a pair of the goggles himself. “It supports spatial audio in Dolby Atmos, as well as Dolby Vision.”

That emphasis on entertainment consumption is no accident: Meta’s new VR device, which brings virtual reality to a glasses-like form factor, is at its core a bet that VR can be the future of TV – and that there are large, untapped audiences out there ready to embrace this use case. All those people needed to finally jump on board, so Meta’s argument goes, is a device that’s lighter, more comfortable and less isolating, while also offering fun new ways to consume the types of content people already know and crave.

“Entertainment, sports, movies, music is something everyone loves,” said Meta Reality Labs director of entertainment experiences Sarah Malkin when I talked to her ahead of the keynote. “To be able to provide a premium entertainment device was central,” she added.

Meta executives have talked about this idea of VR as the future of entertainment for a long time. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the New York Times in 2017 that TVs would eventually be replaced by apps running AR and VR headsets and glasses.  

And last year, Meta’s director of games Chris Pruett told GDC attendees that the company saw a new user cohort emerging that prioritized leanback entertainment over hardcore gaming. “These are, you know, kind of … dads,” Pruett said. “30-something men in the United States who really like to watch TV. They watch sports, they watch movies, they watch television.”

“These are people who are interested in high-fidelity media consumption,” Pruett added. “And as the resolution of our devices increases, it’s increasingly viable for them to use our headsets as a replacement for their television.”

Of course, resolution is just one aspect to make VR devices more user-friendly. Watching three-hour movies with a hot and heavy computer strapped to your face isn’t exactly everyone’s cup of tea either. That’s why Meta’s new VR Glasses outsource much of the memory and compute to an external puck, similar to Apple Vision Pro, leaving wearers with a glasses-like visor that weighs “around 100 grams,” according to Meta (the Meta Quest 3 headset weighs around 500 grams, while Apple’s Vision Pro comes in at 750-800 grams).

The company is betting that consumers will use its lightweight VR Glasses more frequently, and for longer sessions, than existing headsets. Entertainment apps are meant to play a key role in forming those habits. “We definitely see people returning again and again for the media and movies offering,” said Malkin.

When the glasses launch next spring, they will offer access to streaming content from services like Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, HBO Max, Crunchyroll, Plex and Tubi through its TV app, with additional services like Netflix being available through the device’s web browser.

Meta will also open its own video download store to offer access to both 2D and 3D movies, including IMAX Enhanced titles; Disney Plus and others will make 3D content available to streaming subscribers through the device for the first time. “It's an opportunity for movies that have been in 3D libraries for a very long time without any place to be seen to come to light,” Malkin said.