Hints to desires for future headset "that can do both AR and VR" with eye-tracking.

SAN JOSE—On stage at the annual Oculus Connect conference today, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a new piece of VR hardware that he hoped would provide a "sweet spot" between untracked mobile phone-powered VR like Samsung's Gear VR and high-end tethered headsets like the Oculus Rift.

While stressing that "it's still early," Zuckerberg shared a short video showing a wireless headset that uses "inside-out tracking" from an internal camera to track the user's position, without the need for an external camera or a connection to outside hardware. Zuckerberg called the computer vision necessary to get this kind of inside-out tracking "one of the toughest problems in computer science" but said that Facebook was "making progress" on solving it, to the point where you could track the user within a millimeter.

"We have a demo, but we don't have a product yet," Zuckerberg said. "This is the kind of thing we believe will exist... a completely new category of virtual reality product."

Elsewhere in the keynote presentation, Zuckerberg laid out some other vague aspirations for the future of VR. "We want hardware that’s lighter form factor, that’s smaller, that can do both VR and AR, that can do eye tracking hand tracking," he said to the Oculus Connect keynote crowd.