Facebook unveils the Meta Quest Pro
It's been rumored and leaked, but it's finally official. Meta announced the Meta Quest Pro and for productivity and play, this looks like a very nice VR HMD for those purposes.
The design is all black unlike the mostly white Meta Quest 2. There's super thin lenses in the front to make the HMD smaller and thinner. It's a halo design where you can put the Quest Pro on your head and bring it down like a cap with your forehead and the back of your head being the main touchpoints for the headset. The side is open so you can see the world, but there's magnetic plates to block everything out if you want to be fully immersed in the HMD.
New and improved LCD displays are used with that have a 37% more pixels per inch and 75% more contrast. It won't match the black levels of an OLED display that's going to be used in say the PlayStation VR2 or older HMDs like the Samsung Odyssey+, but I found the displays on the Quest 2 to be pretty good nevertheless and I have higher expectations for the ones on the Quest Pro.
Inside the Quest Pro is the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+. Meta is saying it has 50% more power than the Quest 2 so you should get some pretty good stand alone performance.
The controllers have been nicely upgraded and can now track themselves. They have cameras on them so they don't rely on the headset and that should remove any occlusion issues. No sensing ring necessary now. They also have haptics to give you some nice feedback. I've always wondered if there was a way to incorporate cameras on the controllers themselves for headsets that have inside out tracking and it looks like Meta has indeed gone this route.
Meta showed a stylus attachment that will let you write things more naturally and it's a tease of the ability to attach other things to the controllers to add functionality to them.
There's a charging dock that you can just drop it in and charge both the headset and controllers.
Mixed reality is something a lot of people have been asking for and Meta is going in on that feature. The cameras on the Quest Pro can capture 4x more resolution than the Quest 2 to capture the outer world and they are now in color rather than black and white. Meta showed off many collaborative tools that they are working on that will let you work with others from around the world.
Microsoft also made a showing and talked about how they are incorporating VR into Teams and Office365 . But for us gamers, they are indeed working on an XCloud app for the Quest Pro to allow you to play games on a virtual big screen. And Satya Nadella even teased VR in the future so that should be exciting if they can get cloud streaming VR to work on the Quest Pro.
You can pre-order today for $1,499 and ships on October 25th. That's a mighty big increase over the Meta Quest 2, but this HMD is made for productivity and more than just play. Of course, the features included sounds like it should make for a great headset to do wireless gaming from either internal games or streaming from the computer.
