A Korean news report suggests Meta is partnering with LG to release a successor to its high-end Quest Pro virtual reality headset in 2025. As spotted by UploadVR, Maeil Business Newspaper writes that Meta has struck a deal for a joint venture with LG. The resulting headset is rumored to be priced at around $2,000 and use LG displays, as well as other parts from LG subsidiaries like LG Innotek. Maeil Business Newspaper furthermore claims Meta will release a low-end Quest headset in 2024 that could cost under $200.
Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from The Verge, and some of the details of the report seem unintuitive. $200 would be a major price drop for the consumer Quest; the Quest 2 sells for $299 after Meta briefly attempted to raise the price, and the upcoming Quest 3 was announced at $499. The report also says the new high-end headset will be called the “Meta Quest 4 Pro,” which would break Meta’s current convention of keeping the Quest and Quest Pro lineup numbering separate.
Overall, however, the report tracks roughly with Meta’s past behavior in the VR space. Although $200 would be very cheap, The Verge has previously reported that a cheap headset codenamed Ventura is indeed planned for 2024, with a Quest Pro successor likely after that. And as UploadVR notes, Meta (formerly Facebook) has released several headsets as joint-branded products. The Oculus Rift S bore Lenovo branding, the low-end Oculus Go was manufactured by Xiaomi, and Samsung made the mobile Gear VR.
That said, it’s worth pointing out that none of these were considered the most exciting Meta/Facebook headsets at the time of their release, which is contrary to how Meta has positioned the Quest Pro. The Rift S was Meta’s final wired-only headset before it focused entirely on the all-in-one Quest lineup, the Go was a low-end Rift and Quest alternative, and the Gear VR was a super-cheap alternative to the then-cutting-edge Rift. (A counter-example may be Meta’s high-profile partnership with Ray-Ban on smart glasses, but Meta also described that as an early foray into augmented reality.) Meta has portrayed the Pro as a testing ground for innovative VR tech that will come more slowly to its cheaper mass-market products. An LG joint venture could maintain that role, but only if it looks a little different from some of those past partnerships.
