Quest v79 Matches The Color Temperature Of 2D Windows To Your Ambient Lighting

Quest’s Horizon OS v79 brings Adaptive Lighting, wherein your headset adjusts the color temperature of 2D windows to match the ambient lighting of your physical environment.

It also brings an improved Files app, Meta says, with search and the ability to open PDFs.

As with all Meta Horizon OS updates, v79 will “roll out” gradually, so it may take a few days or even weeks for your headset to get the v79 update. Further, Meta rolls out some features separately from the main update itself, so even having the v79 update doesn’t guarantee having everything listed here yet.

Adaptive Lighting

Adaptive Lighting is an always-on feature of Horizon OS v79, with no setting available to toggle it on or off.

It adjusts the color temperature of all 2D windows, and the new Navigator UI, to match the ambient lighting of your physical environment.

Color temperature, if you’re unfamiliar, refers to the “warmth” or “coolness” of white light, measured in Kelvins (K). You may have encountered it when buying an LED lightbulb, and your choice of color temperature will significantly alter the atmosphere of the room.

Some traditional consumer electronic devices already have an option to match the color temperature of the display to ambient lighting. On iPhone, iPad, and Mac, Apple calls the feature True Tone. On Nest Hub smart displays, Google calls it Ambient EQ. And on Pixel Tablet, Google calls it Adaptive Tone (yes, Google has two names for the same feature). And Apple Vision Pro automatically matches all virtual elements in the Shared Space, both 2D and 3D, to ambient lighting.

But what’s interesting here is that all the devices I just mentioned achieve this through the use of an ambient light sensor, which no Quest headset has. That suggests Meta is using a computer vision algorithm to analyze the passthrough camera view and determine the ambient color temperature. This approach is also used in ARKit on iOS/iPadOS and ARCore on Android.

Improved Files App

Horizon OS 79 also brings an improved Files app.

Files now has search, letting you search by filename. There are also now more tabs: Media, Spatial Videos, Panoramas, and Downloads.

Further, Files can now open PDFs natively. It was technically already possible to open PDFs on Quest using Adobe Acrobat, a free web app on the store, but it requires logging into an Adobe account, and doesn’t work offline.