The Oculus Quest 2 may be our pick for the best VR headset you can buy right now, but it looks like the Oculus Quest 3 will bring some serious upgrades

In an interview with The Information (flagged by UploadVR), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the next Oculus Quest will allow users to have a more realistic presence in virtual environments by and explained how it will feature face and eye tracking Zuckerberg also essentially confirmed that there will be an Oculus Quest 4 in the not-too-distant future

"Given how the hardware is being developed, we need to know at the same time what the next three products will look like," he said We're currently setting up a product team to study the next few generations of virtual reality and what Quest 3 and 4 will look like"

Given the willingness to find a buyer for the Oculus Quest 2, it is not surprising that Facebook is planning for future generations, capitalizing on the success that VR headsets are experiencing

However, while Quest 2 is excellent for VR experiences and games, it appears that more work needs to be done to make it a platform for a truly cohesive virtual presence One way to do that, according to Zuckerberg, is through eye and face tracking This can better capture a person's facial expressions and translate them into virtual avatars, giving them a more realistic presence in a virtual environment [because] if you're really excited about social presence, you want to have all the sensors in the device to really animate a realistic avatar so you can communicate well," Zuckerberg explained

The social networking luminary explained that there are technical challenges to making this happen given the number of sensors needed for a VR headset: the Oculus Quest and Quest 2 are both all-in-one systems, so there are no external sensors, It is worth remembering that computing power is relatively limited In general, more advanced tracking tends to be the domain of expensive VR headsets connected to powerful PCs such as the Valve Index

"On the VR side, what we're most focused on right now is how to pack more sensors into the device to create a better social experience Each sensor requires more CPU power to operate, which generates more heat, which causes all these different problems," Zuckerberg said

He continued that better face and eye tracking would create more realistic avatars Avatars already exist on Facebook's main platform - see the guide on how to create Facebook avatars - but they have a very cartoonish aesthetic

It is not clear how soon Facebook will announce the next generation Oculus Quest But this is a teaser of what we can expect from the next Quest headset, and it is rather promising