Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said that it will no longer update the functions of Quest 1, the original virtual reality device, and will also cancel some social functions of Quest 1. But the company says it will also deliver “significant bug fixes and security patches” to Quest 1 until 2024.
The notice sent by Meta to users via email shows that the company will stop providing new features for Quest 1, and most of the original features will continue to work normally, but users will not be able to “create or join parties” in the future, and “can currently access Meta Users of Horizon Home social services will lose these features on March 5, 2023.” Meta also said that Quest 1 will receive “significant bug fixes and security patches” until 2024.
The original Quest, released in 2019 under the Oculus brand, was the predecessor to the Quest 2 virtual reality headset, which was released in 2020. The feature updates for both devices have been largely the same over the years, with only fundamentally different hardware configurations.
Quest 2 has a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip inside. The chip, released in 2020, is designed for use in augmented reality and virtual reality devices. In contrast, the original Quest used Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 chipset, which was released in 2017, and used the Kryo 280 core. It is speculated that Meta stopped the feature update of the first generation of Quest this time. It may have encountered trouble in developing new features that match the hardware equipment, or it may be due to budget constraints and layoffs that the company does not want to continue to spend money on old hardware. It’s also possible that Qualcomm stopped supporting feature development for older chips.
Last month, well-known programmer and Oculus executive John Carmack announced his departure from Meta. Before that, he had been sharply critical of the company’s underutilization of hardware.
While this move will disappoint Quest 1 owners, there are already signs that Meta will stop updating the device’s features. Last year, Meta took some steps to prevent the virtual reality chicken game Population: One from running on Quest 1.
