Consumer Technology Meta Connect 2022 - Quest Pro out this month for $1500

[TwinIon]

Meta is holding their big Connect conference today. The first big piece of news is that they finally announced the Quest Pro. It's an impressive headset, but unlike many current devices, they take the "Pro" part of the name seriously. It's $1,500 and is primarily focused at business usage. It runs off a new Snapdragon XR2+ chip, has 12GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. The screens are 1800x1920 per eye at 90Hz, with new lenses Meta promises will make a big difference in things like reading text. Thew new controllers look similar to those on the Quest 2, but they lack the LED ring, opting instead to have their own inside out tracking cameras. There are also new inward facing cameras that they can use for foveated rendering and facial expression tracking.

One thing that has gotten worse is the battery life, which Meta estimates at only one to two hours. There's a sleek dock to keep both the headset and controllers ready to go, and you can swap out the battery quickly should you need to, but even for a business device, you're not spending too much of the day in this thing without extra batteries, swapped or external.

 

There is a lot of Metaverse stuff they've announced, like expanded cross-app avatars that will even have legs. They announced a big partnership with Microsoft for Office, Windows, and Xcloud streaming. Plus a lot of expected updates to their Horizon product for work and play.

 

They mentioned making the VR display the best display you own, working on virtual displays of any size, but it seemed like they were hedging quite a bit, indicating that they're not quite there. The Pro is probably a good step in that direction, but I wouldn't expect it to be a go to for standard work or 2D games.

 

I watched the keynote in my Quest 2 and if the avatars they were showing are actually what they'll ship, it's pretty impressive. I'm still far from sold that VR is a decent fit for many work cases.

 

The experimental stuff they showed continues to look cool, but who knows how long before any of it actually shows up in products. I'm looking forward to John Carmack's talk, as he's always pretty straightforward, even if overly technical.

[TheLeon]

Well, glad I bought a Quest 2 when I did instead of waiting for the Pro. 

 

But as far as I'm concerned, that thing is still pretty much my Beat Saber player. 

[Ghost_MH]

I mean, it's a lot cheaper than the Hololens for enterprise uses, but I wonder if it'll actually be any good for professional use. If "professional" to Meta means holding meetings in VR, we should just laugh them out of the nearest conference room. Who the hell can hold a productive meeting without access to their laptop? Meta's idea for VR meetings sound like their only experience with meetings in attending presentations.

[Derek]

One to two hour battery life? Ouchie.

[LazyPiranha]

14 hours ago, Ghost_MH said:

I mean, it's a lot cheaper than the Hololens for enterprise uses, but I wonder if it'll actually be any good for professional use. If "professional" to Meta means holding meetings in VR, we should just laugh them out of the nearest conference room. Who the hell can hold a productive meeting without access to their laptop? Meta's idea for VR meetings sound like their only experience with meetings in attending presentations.

Forget about using a laptop or anything else, what benefit does this have over something like zoom or Skype?  What business is going to fork over $1,500 per user to have VR meetings with cutesy little avatars that have to be 60 minutes or less?  Sure I can imagine a small handful of very specific use cases, but for the overwhelming majority of businesses this is completely unnecessary.   

[Ghost_MH]

1 hour ago, LazyPiranha said:

Forget about using a laptop or anything else, what benefit does this have over something like zoom or Skype?  What business is going to fork over $1,500 per user to have VR meetings with cutesy little avatars that have to be 60 minutes or less?  Sure I can imagine a small handful of very specific use cases, but for the overwhelming majority of businesses this is completely unnecessary.   

 

I get that the Hololens 2 is like $3500, but nothing I've seen about the Quest Pro's performance would indicate it's in the same ballpark. Without optical passthrough, it isn't realistic to expect this device to be used for diagnostics, medical purposes, design, or anything like that. I mean, the interface is still just Quest-style Android. Only now there's color passthrough video.

 

What's even more baffling is that this product is completely at odds with Meta's own corporate policies. They've been delaying getting people back into the office, but they've also been pushing folks to return. What is even the point of asking anyone to come back if you feel the Metaverse is how meetings should be held going forward?

[TwinIon]

After watching the John Carmack talk and thinking about it a bit more, I'm increasingly puzzled by the choices that Meta made with the Pro. Carmack made it pretty clear that the Pro doesn't meaningfully advance things in the areas that he's interested in, and with the price and target market what they are, he will likely continue to focus on the Quest 2. That makes me think that Meta might have been better off making the device even higher end, maybe even all they way up to the Hololens 2 price of $3500. Make it super clear that this is something for businesses and really push the bounds on the tech.

 

As it stands, the Pro is running a chip that is basically the same the Quest 2 has, but overclocked. They really prioritized the size of the device, which lead to the adoption of the pancake lens, but at the cost of not really improving the resolution or the FOV. The controllers are interesting, but I agree with Carmack that the benefits seem much more theoretical than practical. How often are your hands really behind your back or otherwise occluded in VR? Also, any dev making software for both devices will just ignore a feature that makes the controllers alone cost as much as a Quest 2. He also talked a bit about using the Pro as a primary display, creating virtual screens for normal work. He said that doing so would be "super painful" for quite a while.

 

I feel like Meta wanted the Pro to be cheap enough that Indie devs and enthusiasts would pick one up and where businesses would consider buying boatloads of them, but I don't think they made it capable enough to justify the investments that they're asking for.

 

Even for the use case that Zuck pitched hardest, and where so much of the focus of the device is, I got the impression that it wouldn't really change the game. Carmack seemed to think that there simply isn't enough processing power to fully render the very enhanced avatars that we saw in the demo in a space with many people. He gave his talk in Horizon using a Pro, but didn't have the new avatar features (including face tracking) turned on. He said he had to run a special dev build just so his standard Avatar wouldn't dip in quality.

 

All this means that even at $1500, the Pro is still very much a stepping stone device. Not really good enough for the use cases they envision people using headsets for in the future, but maybe enough to start refining those ideas. That's an awkward place to put a device.

 

There were a couple other interesting things he mentioned. One is that the battery is bigger than the Quest 2, so if you're just doing the same things on the Pro you would on the 2, battery life should be better. If you're using passthrough and pushing it harder, then the battery life will be worse.

 

The other thing was that he mentioned how having an expensive device that covered it's own costs changed their own incentives at Meta. While selling a headset below cost, they're less incentivized to build the big free metaverse style apps that could be really interesting, because they need to make some money off this thing. If they're selling the device at a profit, they can focus more on the free stuff that could drive adoption. Who knows how that will work in practice, but it's an interesting insight.

[stepee]

1 hour ago, TwinIon said:

After watching the John Carmack talk and thinking about it a bit more, I'm increasingly puzzled by the choices that Meta made with the Pro. Carmack made it pretty clear that the Pro doesn't meaningfully advance things in the areas that he's interested in, and with the price and target market what they are, he will likely continue to focus on the Quest 2. That makes me think that Meta might have been better off making the device even higher end, maybe even all they way up to the Hololens 2 price of $3500. Make it super clear that this is something for businesses and really push the bounds on the tech.

 

As it stands, the Pro is running a chip that is basically the same the Quest 2 has, but overclocked. They really prioritized the size of the device, which lead to the adoption of the pancake lens, but at the cost of not really improving the resolution or the FOV. The controllers are interesting, but I agree with Carmack that the benefits seem much more theoretical than practical. How often are your hand really behind your back or otherwise occluded in VR? Also, any dev making software for both devices will just ignore that a feature that makes the controllers alone cost as much as a Quest 2. He also talked a bit about using the Pro as a primary display, creating virtual screens for normal work. He said that doing so would be "super painful" for quite a while.

 

I feel like Meta wanted the Pro to be cheap enough that Indie devs and enthusiasts would pick one up and where businesses would consider buying boatloads of them, but I don't think they made it capable enough to justify the investments that they're asking for.

 

Even for the use case that Zuck pitched hardest, and where so much of the focus of the device is, I got the impression that it wouldn't really change the game. Carmack seemed to think that there simply isn't enough processing power to fully render the very enhanced avatars that we saw in the demo in a space with many people. He gave his talk in Horizon using a Pro, but didn't have the new avatar features (including face tracking) turned on. He said he had to run a special dev build just so his standard Avatar wouldn't dip in quality.

 

All this means that even at $1500, the Pro is still very much a stepping stone device. Not really good enough for the use cases they envision people using headsets for in the future, but maybe enough to start refining those ideas. That's an awkward place to put a device.

 

There were a couple other interesting things he mentioned. One is that the battery is bigger than the Quest 2, so if you're just doing the same things on the Pro you would on the 2, battery life should be better. If you're using passthrough and pushing it harder, then the battery life will be worse.

 

The other thing was that he mentioned how having an expensive device that covered it's own costs changed their own incentives at Meta. While selling a headset below cost, they're less incentivized to build the big free metaverse style apps that could be really interesting, because they need to make some money off this thing. If they're selling the device at a profit, they can focus more on the free stuff that could drive adoption. Who knows how that will work in practice, but it's an interesting insight.

 

lol sounds like John essentially just trashed the device, that’s awesome

[BloodyHell]

22 hours ago, Derek said:

One to two hour battery life? Ouchie.

Have you ever used a vr headset? Honestly, an hour is the absolute limit I want them on my head. They are amazing gaming devices, but they aren't something you can sit down and play for hours on end. Or at least I can't.

[b_m_b_m_b_m]

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

[Kal-El814]

$1500 or $15, right now the Metaverse and all this "enterprise" stuff are solutions in search of problems.

[Derek]

2 hours ago, BloodyHell said:

Have you ever used a vr headset? Honestly, an hour is the absolute limit I want them on my head. They are amazing gaming devices, but they aren't something you can sit down and play for hours on end. Or at least I can't.

I haven't, but that sounds right to me. I also don't like to work for more than an hour or two, so this being geared towards business usage seems fine.

[outsida]

On 10/13/2022 at 8:30 AM, b_m_b_m_b_m said:

My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Apparently the whole presentation was bullshot.