This shouldn’t really surprise us since they’ve had a product on the market for a while that comes with a built-in display. We are referring to the proceeds of the takeover of Oculus by Facebook, now under a different name, which resulted in the development of the current Meta Quest. We don’t know when the next generation will arrive, but the development of its screens by Meta is already underway.
Quest virtual reality headsets have been relatively successful, despite their success compared to other products of the same type, they have not yet reached the zenith of popularity to be considered a mass product, but they do not have not reached the technical peak either, and VR is still very green. With monitors and televisions having reached the limit of the visible pixel, it is now Meta’s turn to develop its own designed displays and it will not do so alone, but with two large South Korean multinationals.
Meta crafting screens? Well yes, with SK Hynix and LG
Meta reportedly strikes deal with SK Hynix and LG Display to create Micro-OLED displays on a large scale in which the triumvirate of companies each would have a very specific role, but in which the company owned by Facebook would be responsible for designing the specifications of said screens. Everything therefore suggests that it is very likely that they will be found in the next generation of Meta Quest, whether in its standard version, in the Pro version or both. Unless it’s clear that Zuckerberg has plans to get into the hardware world by launching his own devices outside of VR.
For VR applications, the beauty of Micro-OLED displays is that they have the ability to handle resolutions of thousands of dots per inch, compared to hundreds of dots per inch in current VR units. This would allow the next generation of virtual reality headsets to achieve the best possible image quality, that of 60 pixels per degree of vision.
In the pact between three, we can understand that LG is based on its experience with screens, but SK Hynix participates in the inclusion of specialized circuits for certain specific VR functions. That is to say, small accelerators and sensors that would be placed around the helmet or that would reduce latencies on the screens of the Meta Quest of the future.
Could it go on smartphones and tablets?
Despite what we’ve said we don’t think Meta bothers to build its own devices, if it did it would be with an Android variant tied to its own app store as it already does with the Meta Quest. However, the reason all of this makes us doubt is that Micro-OLED’s high pixel-per-inch resolution wouldn’t be used in a tablet, but its application in virtual reality makes a lot of sense where it’s still possible to achieve a higher resolution visible to the eyes of the user.
They won’t leave Qualcomm aside for the future of Meta Quest
While everything points to a virtual reality variant of its Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Meta’s next generation of virtual reality, the announcement of the agreement with the two Korean companies does not mean the end of the agreement with Qualcomm by Meta, more than anything due to the fact that they were using 28-45nm for the Meta node screen circuits. Moreover, it would be on the side of SK Hynix that they would have saved to avoid its closure.
The production capacity of said plant is 100,000 wafers of 300 mm diameter per month, in addition to chips, LG Micro-OLED panels will be implemented. As a curiosity, the same manufacturing plant until recently manufactured RAM memories. Is it possible they developed a frame buffer system to reduce latency with frame buffering? We’ll see how this deal ends up in the end.
