It seems like the teased Horizon OS headsets from Asus ROG and Lenovo won't be shipping after all.

In a statement to Road to VR, Meta says it has "paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market".

“We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves”, the statement continues.

Meta Horizon OS Will Run On Headsets From Asus & Lenovo

Meta is rebranding its Quest software platform to Meta Horizon OS and opening it up to third-party headset makers, including Asus and Lenovo.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

The news comes just under 20 months after Meta officially announced that third-party headsets running Quest's operating system, which it branded Horizon OS, were in the works.

At the time, Meta said Asus was working on a "performance gaming headset" under its ROG brand, while Lenovo was working on "a line of headsets" for "productivity, learning, and entertainment".

We heard nothing official about the Asus ROG headset after this point, though a rumor back in January suggested that it would have face and eye tracking and use either QD-LCD panels with local dimming or micro-OLED displays.

Meanwhile, around a year ago at Lenovo Tech World 2024, the company confirmed that it was still working on its Horizon OS headset.

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The decision to "pause" the program for third-party Horizon OS headsets may have come alongside the wider cuts to the VR and Horizon Worlds teams at Meta, widely reported by outlets like Bloomberg, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Business Insider earlier this month.

Shortly after those reports, Meta issued an official statement confirming "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables".

Today's news doesn't mean the end of Horizon OS headsets, though, just that they won't be coming from third parties – at least not any time soon.

Meta's statement mentions building "world-class first-party hardware" for VR, and leaked memos from earlier this month reveal that the company is actively working on at least two Horizon OS products.

Meta Delays Ultralight Headset, Starts Work On Gaming-Focused Quest 4

Meta is delaying its ultralight headset with a tethered puck to the first half of 2027, and, separately, starting work on a gaming-focused Quest 4, leaked memos reveal.

UploadVRDavid Heaney

According to those internal memos, Meta plans to launch its rumored ultralight "mixed reality glasses" headset with a tethered compute puck in the first half of 2027, and recently started work on a gaming-focused Quest 4 set to be a "large upgrade" over Quest 3, though at a higher price.

Given this timeline, Quest 3 owners hoping for a direct upgrade within the Horizon OS ecosystem could be waiting another two or three years, meaning Quest 3 would end up being Meta's all-in-one flagship for four or five years without a direct successor. And when that successor does arrive, it's set to have a notably higher price.

Google's Android XR Takes The Stage

The news of the "pause" of the third-party Meta Horizon OS hardware program comes just over a month after Lynx revealed that Google terminated its Android XR deal.

Lynx was one of the three additional companies, after Samsung, that Google said were working on an Android XR device when the operating system was announced late last year, the other two being Xreal and Sony.

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When asked about the Lynx termination, Google told UploadVR that it's still working with Xreal and Sony, and last week it and Xreal confirmed that Project Aura is still on track to launch in 2026 as the second Android XR headset.

With Meta's Horizon OS now unavailable for third-party hardware, it seems we can expect any future entrants to the standalone headset market to use Google's Android XR instead – for the foreseeable future at least.

Quest's Hand Tracking 2.4 update significantly improves the Fast Motion Mode, better handling rapid movements like punching and swinging.

Since launching controller-free hand tracking as a software update for the original Oculus Quest experimentally in late 2019 and publicly in early 2020, Meta has continued to improve the feature, gradually bridging much of the tracking quality difference compared to controllers.

• Hand Tracking 2.0 in 2022 brought improvements to handling fast movements, occlusion, and touching your hands together.
• Hand Tracking 2.1 in early 2023 reduced tracking loss and the time to re-acquire hands after loss, as well as improving the accuracy of prediction for fast motion.
• Hand Tracking 2.2 in mid 2023 reduced the latency of hand tracking, with Meta claiming up to 40% reduction in typical usage and up to 75% during fast movement.
• Hand Tracking 2.3 last year brought enhanced stability, improved accuracy, and even lower latency.

Normally, Quest's hand tracking samples the tracking cameras at 30Hz. Optionally, the developers of apps can enable Fast Motion Mode, which makes the cameras sample at 50Hz or 60Hz, depending on your country's mains electricity frequency, to sync up with artificial lighting.

The higher sampling rate of Fast Motion Mode improves the tracking of fast motions, with the tradeoff of introducing some jitter that can make hand tracking feel slightly less accurate. Fast Motion Mode also requires brighter room lighting on headsets older than Quest 3S, because the camera exposure is lower, bringing less light, so without IR illuminators this will cause the tracking to degrade more.

Fast Motion Mode also cannot be used alongside simultaneous hands and controllers mode, and can only be combined with inside-out body tracking in VR, not passthrough mixed reality. Further, on Quest Pro, Fast Motion Mode can't be used alongside eye tracking or face tracking.

Still, these tradeoffs aside, Fast Motion Mode is ideal for fast-paced immersive games, and that's what Hand Tracking 2.4 is focused on improving.

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We confirmed: while Quest 3S has inferior lenses and display, it actually has better low-light head & hand tracking than Quest 3.

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Meta says that Hand Tracking 2.4 arrived in Horizon OS v83, which started rolling out last month.

According to Meta, Hands 2.4 brings the following improvements to Fast Motion Mode:

• Faster Hand Acquisition: "Hands are detected faster when re-entering view. This reduces the 'hand loss' feeling during fast movements."
• Advanced Motion Upsampling: "Smooths out rapid gestures so motion appears continuous instead of choppy while minimizing motion artifacts."
• Optimized Fast Motion Filters: "Helps eliminate perceived latency between hand tracking and controller input during high-energy interactions."

Again though, keep in mind that Fast Motion Mode is a feature developers need to enable for their apps, so you'll only see this in games that chose to use it.

You should be able to test it out in Meta's free demo app from 2023 called Move Fast, which is designed to showcase how hand tracking can be used for immersive fitness games.

visionOS 26.2 brings official support for using Apple Vision Pro in cars and buses via improved tracking in Travel Mode.

Apple Vision Pro was the first headset to deliver a Travel Mode, meaning a toggle that makes its positional tracking system work while in a moving vehicle, when it launched in early 2024.

Since then, over the years, Meta, Pico, Snap, and Google have followed with their own implementations of Travel Mode for their headsets.

At launch, Apple's Travel Mode was specifically designed for airplanes. With visionOS 2 last year, it was updated to officially support trains. And now with visionOS 26.2, released last week, Apple Vision Pro officially supports cars and buses too.

"Travel Mode lets passengers use Apple Vision Pro on cars and busses in addition to airplanes and train", Apple's release notes read.

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I say "officially" because the feature did already work in these scenarios. When picking up Apple Vision Pro in New York at launch, I used its Travel Mode in the back of an Uber. It worked, with some minor jitter.

I'll be sure to try Apple Vision Pro's Travel Mode again next time I'm in a long distance Uber, Waymo, or bus, as I'm curious to see how much improvement the official support brings.

The update arrived on the same week that Google announced and started rolling out a Travel Mode for Android XR on Galaxy XR, which officially only supports planes.

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