A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company was rebranding the Quest operating system to ‘Horizon OS’ and announced it was working with select partners to launch third-party VR headsets powered by the operating system.
Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an “all-new performance gaming headset,” while Lenovo was purportedly working on “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.”
“We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market,” a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. “We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves.”
Valve should talk to them about getting SteamOS on these devices. AndroidXR is probably easier, but at least Lenovo has been burned by Google before, so they might be open to the idea.
Maybe this is what has happened. Asus and Lenovo wanting to support both HorizonOS and SteamOS on their hardware, and Meta realizing that they cannot compete with an open Linux platform on a level playing field. So they returned to their walled garden software-hardware bundling.
