The pricing is a bit of a sticker shock, but if anyone can make the $1,500 price point work, it's the company that also sells a $400 headset.
What's really interesting to me is that this headset seems to echo Apple's (purported) interests in a "premium" hardware generation targeted at enthusiasts and developers. The Quest is ultimately a leftover from the Oculus acquisition, so it should be really interesting to see how this hardware evolves under Meta's leadership.
Meta will need cheap headsets to get adoption of their platform.
I reckon the Pro has a healthy margin and will targets companies. They will use Accenture and peddle the Microsoft suite VR to sell tens of thousands of these to companies for remote work, and most of them will barely be used .
Meta can stem the losses of the VR division, and a Quest 3 will come in a while.
Really? The Quest 2 is definitely a Facebook-made device, but I believe the original Quest was inherited from Oculus's design labs (even though Facebook ultimately took over).
Edit: I did some digging, and the situation is actually pretty complicated. Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, but they continued operating as an "autonomous subsidiary" for a few years before being absorbed into Meta and rebranded as Reality Labs. I guess it really depends on your frame of thought, but I seem to be wrong here.
Not really. In fact, if you put aside the standalone features, this is arguably a worse piece of hardware than Valve's Index. If you do consider the standalone functionality, the internals are hardly an upgrade over the Quest 2.
Meta doesn't seem to be betting on a future where people overly care about specs or prices though. I think they want this to be the Macbook Pro of VR headsets, the sort of thing that Metaverse-enabled companies buy up without a second thought and distribute to their employees because it's "enterprise ready". It's definitely not the sort of strategy that will succeed in the B2C model, but they've already got a victory there. Now they need to scale the technology up for businesses, and that's the interesting part (for me).
> this is arguably a worse piece of hardware than Valve's Index
Could you expand on this?
Even the Quest 2 has considerably lower screen door effect [1]. The quest pro has double the valve index PPD (~14 vs ~32). The selling point of the Index is FOV. 90 degrees is plenty for work.
It depends on how you want to argue. For me, refresh rate and FOV matter most. Low refresh headsets make me nauseated, and the Quest 1 can easily start to verge on that sickness after 30 minutes to an hour of playtime. The Index did a good job at mitigating that sickness feeling, and the FOV seems very desirable if people want to use these headsets as monitor replacements.
Quest 1 hasn't been sold in over two years, so I'm not sure it's a good benchmark.
The quest 2 has had official 120Hz support for a while now [1], and I don't imagine they'll regress for Quest Pro. I don't think FOV, beyond 90, is all that important for productivity. Peripheral vision is extremely useful for immersion, but probably not really for reading code on an adjacent monitor. I personally agree with the comfort of usual ergonomic guidelines, keeping eye movement within 30 degrees or so [2]. As a quick litmus test, observe someone working with multiple monitors. You'll see they move their head, not just their eyes.
> The Oculus Quest 2 VR headset is the second version of the Quest headset range. It's similar to the original Oculus Quest in that it's a battery-powered, standalone headset that allows you to freely roam around your physical and digital play spaces without fear of tripping over a wire.
The Quest 2 and the Quest Pro are both "standalones".
Sorry I didn't exactly come in at the base-level here :p
The "killer feature" of the Quest/Quest 2 was that it cost $400 and came with everything you needed to get into VR. No PC required, no cables, no nothing. This is what really propelled Meta into the spotlight, and it's probably why they're even being given another shot with the Quest Pro. Other headsets, like the Windows Mixed Reality line and Valve's Index are decidedly better units, but they require pricy Windows computers and often force you to stay tethered to the machine. The Quest being battery-powered lets you use it wirelessly and anywhere you want. Having tried a few other models, the Quest has always been most comfortable to me purely because there aren't any cables sticking out of your head.
TL:DR - Meta makes seriously badass VR hardware that's held back by Facebook software. Hopefully John Carmack (or suitable legislation) will give us the best of both worlds.
In Lex Fridman's podcast, Carmack says he's officially only working 1 day at Meta in advisory capacity, though sometimes chimes in on other days as well. He also says he wants to completely focus on AGI, so I wouldn't rely on Carmack to push the VR field forward in the near future.
IMHO the wireless is a killer feature. Having cables attached seriously limits your design space for games. Room scale is a lot less practical because you can get tangled up in the cables. VR is best when you're not sitting in a chair and can move freely, even if you're stuck in a small area.
Also, you can have your cake and eat it with the Quest 2, since you can Quest Link over WiFi and play your Steam catalog or indie games if you do happen to have one of those "pricy Windows computers".
if the battery life is 2 hours max, do most people still play with a cable to avoid having to worry about "is it going to die/do I need to charge it soon" while playing?
You can, personally I never felt the need to tether myself for better battery life. 1-2 hours is about the perfect length for a game session, and I don't think I've been able to run down my Quest 1 past 40% battery before getting sick. It seems like a good tradeoff in retrospect.
What's really interesting to me is that this headset seems to echo Apple's (purported) interests in a "premium" hardware generation targeted at enthusiasts and developers. The Quest is ultimately a leftover from the Oculus acquisition, so it should be really interesting to see how this hardware evolves under Meta's leadership.