So you saw how expensive the Meta Quest Pro was and thought there's no way you can afford that. You also saw how cool the self tracking controllers were and thought, gee I wish I could use those. Well turns out you can.
Meta will be selling the controllers by themselves for $300 and they will be "backwards compatible" with the Quest 2. Remember all those times your headset couldn't see your controllers when they were up close to your HMD? Gone. Or how about the times it lost tracking above your head? Gone too. And behind the back? That's possible now.
With the controllers being able to track themselves, the occlusion effect from controllers or lost tracking due to being out of site of the headset will be eliminated. Well, hopefully. I don't have them on hand and reviewers should be getting their Quest Pros with the controllers to test out real soon. Pre-orders are available and it says it ships on October 25th, but the controllers aren't available by themselves yet. They will be later this year and for $300.
Initially, I thought that was a lot for controllers, but it has some great tech in it like the self tracking, haptics, and finger detection. And considering the Valve Index controllers are $280, the $300 price point doesn't seem as bad. The fact that you can use it with the Quest 2 is pretty stellar and something I'm going to consider purchasing to compliment my Quest 2.
The talk now turns to how long it'll last on battery. The original Quest 2 controllers last for-freaking-ever. Like I can't remember the last time I put in batteries. With the tracking built in, I assume it won't last as long, but hopefully it's more than a few hours. I'll take a good 6-8 hour battery life before needing a recharge if it can truly track itself well enough where it'll come close to Lighthouse tracking.
