Metas Project Cambria headsets could have 12GB of RAM for multitasking, import logs and a potential leak suggests.
Project Cambria was announced in late October on Connect 2021. Cambria is it not Quest 3 – Mark Zuckerberg described it as an “advanced and high-end product” placed “at the higher end of the price range” to be sold along with Quest 2. At one point, it was called ‘Quest Pro’ internally.
Cambria appears to have a more balanced design than Quest 2, with a smaller front box and a strap resembling Quest 2’s elite strap accessories. Meta says this is achieved through the use of pancake lenses instead of fresnel lenses. While Quest 2 has grainy black-and-white cameras, Cambria will have high-resolution color flow for mixed reality experiences. It will also include eye tracking and face tracking for running avatars in social VR.
During Meta’s earnings call for Q1 2022 yesterday, Zuckerberg told investors that Cambria will be “more focused on labor issues” than Quest 2, saying he sees it “eventually replacing your laptop”. Meta has slowly added productivity features to its VR operating system, branded as Infinite Office. If you have a Logitech K830 or Apple Magic Keyboard, they appear in VR so you can type and use the trackpad to navigate. Triple-window support was added to the web browser in August, and window size was added in December.
Quest 2 handles triple windows fine most of the time, but the browser is only available in the home environment. If you want to look something up while still inside a VR app, first close it. This limitation may be due to the fact that the device has only 6 GB of RAM.
Import logs found by SadlyItsBradley, Reggy04and Samulia reference a shipment sent to Meta in March by “SEACLIFFBCM” with “256GB / 12GB” in the description – Seacliff is the code name for the Project Cambria headset. Given Quest 2 is sold in 128 GB and 256 GB models, which is almost certainly the storage size, where 12 GB is the amount of RAM.
SadlyItsBradley (Brad Lynch) also says he has a source claiming Quest OS will be “highly optimized and divided into many independent systems” to enable 3 key features:
- Suspend 2D and VR applications so you can launch another app and resume your progress “seamlessly” later
- Anchoring windows to different areas of your Home space, with the other areas suspended
- System Windows API (beta), which allows developers to install system dashboards (including the browser) in their applications.
It can be argued that Cambria’s extra RAM can be used to handle eye tracking, face tracking and color flow – the Pico Neo 3 Pro Eye has 2GB of extra RAM. But it seems unlikely that a full 6 GB is needed for these features. Given 12GB of RAM, Zuckerberg’s comments on work usage and Brad’s source; Cambria’s hardware may be much more capable of multitasking than Quest 2.