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Meta Launches $1,4999 Quest Pro Headset (theverge.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Meta has finally announced the Meta Quest Pro: a $1,499 virtual reality headset it's been teasing for the past year. The Quest Pro is a new branch of the Quest VR headset lineup, featuring a new processor and screen, a dramatically redesigned body and controllers, inward-facing cameras for eye and face tracking, and a color video feed for mixed reality apps. Preorders open today in 22 countries, and devices will ship on October 25th. From a report: The Quest Pro will sit alongside the $399 Quest 2, which Meta will continue selling as well. But where the Quest 2 user base favors fitness, games, and other entertainment, the Quest Pro is aimed at businesses and professionals who can afford its higher price tag. The Quest Pro is effectively a heavily redesigned Quest 2 with extra features. Its body uses a thinner stack of lenses, which Meta says cuts its depth by 40 percent compared to the Quest 2. It fits on your head with a padded plastic ring (similar to the Quest 2's optional Elite Strap) instead of cloth straps, and its battery has been shifted to the back of the headset, rebalancing it. That helps offset the 722-gram weight, which is quite a bit heavier than the Quest 2's 503 grams, though the difference gets less dramatic with the separate 173-gram Elite Strap. By default, the Quest Pro's thinner lens system means you'll see more peripheral vision and space under your headset. Optional face masks can block those openings, giving you an experience closer to the earlier Quest.
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Meta Launches $1,4999 Quest Pro Headset More

Meta Launches $1,4999 Quest Pro Headset

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  • It won't be ready for business.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @06:01PM (#62957949)
    ... until it can accurately reproduce lunch farts in a conference room.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      That's next years model. It will be called Mega Meta Pro. Its main feature is that it will live your Meta life for you so you can get on with your real life.

    • All for the low, low price of only $1,4999

      *facepalm*
      • That's normally read as "One thousand, four thousand, nine hundred ninety-nine dollars", in case that was confusing.
      • You better believe [wikipedia.org] there's a locale where that's the correct numeric formatting! ... Although in this case it was just a typo and there should only be two nines.
        • oh wait no there isn't

        • Marketing people are assholes and think people are duped into thinking 499 somehow ISN'T just basically 500.

          • The trick is to always round up to the nearest million. That way, you're too poor to ever be able to afford anything, but you're never broke because you can't spend any money.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by bn-7bc ( 909819 )
            well there is about a 1% difference between $499 and $500 (depending on weather you base your calculation on $499 or $500) hardly extremal significant but 3xlarger than the percent wise difference $1499 and $1500, yet it has the same impact on our behavior, psychology is odd. I could somehow understand it in an all cash economy ie nothing vs something left from a stack of 5 $100 bills (for the $499 vs $500 example), but in a world where more and more transactions are either card transactions in store, or

            • well there is about a 1% difference between $499 and $500 (depending on weather you base your calculation on $499 or $500)

              I think you need to go back to school to learn percentages and spelling.

      • To bad /. couldn't pay for any editors. /s

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
      There was actually a device that did this! It was a prototype made for a SouthPark game. It is called the Nosulus Rift. Big Clive did a teardown on YouTube!

  • Can't get people on your platform, so you're gonna attach a $1,500 premium onto it? Maybe if I'd gone to business school, I'd understand this.

  • Trust Meta (Score:3)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @06:20PM (#62957979) Homepage

    Damn you, Zuckerberg! Sneaking in an extra digit on us!

  • Cool! (Score:4, Funny)

    by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @06:27PM (#62957999)

    Me: Cool, I need money!
    Meta: No, you pay us 1500 USD.
    Me: HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

    That is all.

  • Don't see the market... (Score:3)

    by Junta ( 36770 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @06:34PM (#62958017)

    So about on par with the Pico 4 capability wise, except the Pico 4 doesn't have the eye/face tracking. But $1,000 more. That's a whole lot for what amounts to very very little of consequence. If you pay that much, might as well get the Varjo with much nicer specs.

    The biggest thing they have is lock-in for people that buy into Meta's store... But for that much money buy the titles again...

    • There are plenty who can't or won't examine what that extra $1000 gets them, and will still rush to spend it. For example, Apple customers.

      I'm thinking Meta might have realized the general public will never buy into these helmets. Being resigned to low sales volumes, jacking up the price of the hardware might be the way for them to reach break-even on the whole Metaverse thing.

      I play flight simulators, so I am actually in the market for a VR headset. I'm waiting until these things get to be more mature prod

      • For a flight sim, you'd probably just want an HP G2. Very high resolution, no external trackers to deal with. Costs just $350 now: https://www.hp.com/us-en/shop/... [hp.com]

        A slight downside is tracking on the controllers (which have to be seen from the headset's cameras) but that's not an issue for flight simulators. I have an older Samsung Odyssey and it's easily "good enough" to have fun, though the resolution isn't there compared to the HP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jeti ( 105266 )
      The passthrough of the Pico 4 isn't stereoscopic while the one on the Quest Pro is and apparently it features a depth sensor as well. But I agree, the Pico 4 is the more tempting offer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Yeah, another thing where the Quest 2 seems a *touch* better, but $1,000 better is a tough sell.

        Will be interested in through the lense comparisons, if the Pico 4's somewhat higher resolution makes a practical difference or not. However I doubt it would touch the 'cheap' Varjo, which this price would compete directly with.

        *Maybe* the fine grained backlight control will make the contrast better on Quest Pro than Pico 4. While I have tried OLED and LCD and the OLED is much nicer at darkness, in a VR headset

    • But the Pro version of the Pico 4 does have eye/facetracking, and the 'pro gaming' version is only $100-150 more in China, the regular Pro is still not announced for the rest of the world.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Just saw that, yeah, this is more weird for Meta's price point.

        I'm just a bit uncertain about third-party ecosystem support, and ByteDance is even lower on my list of companies I feel comfortable with than Meta.

        Probably the most exciting prospect would be for Deckard to be an impressive offering, if it comes out. Of course Valve doesn't have the most reliable track record for long term support of hardware products

  • Decisions decisions (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @06:41PM (#62958035)
    I could buy a PS5, a better specced PSVR2 when it comes out next year, and save money, or this. With one I could explore untold worlds of wonder. In the other I can pretend I'm in a Mii version of the office I don't want to be in. I dunno, seems like a tough choice.

    • If you're comparing this to a PS5 then you're not the target market. No one is buying this for gaming. It's targeted at people who don't give a shit about the cost and it's about 1/4 the cost of the "AR headset" which I recently trialed at work (which was an utter failure may I add).

  • Wrong headline (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ukoda ( 537183 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @06:54PM (#62958057) Homepage
    $15K WTF! Ah typo, just $1500. Still, if it comes from Meta they will have to pay me to wear it until there is an ad blocker for it.

  • I am pretty sure that $1,4999 isn't even a number.

    • What slashdot needs is meta-editors to edit the editors. Or, they could just hire real editors but, they probably cost money.

    • I am pretty sure that $1,4999 isn't even a number.

      In some parts of Europe it means a dollar fifty after rounding.

  • He doesn't get it (Score:3, Interesting)

    by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @07:24PM (#62958119)

    Looks as if poor old Mark is panicking about the way that young people are deserting the platform and thinks "I know, I'll come up with a whole new paradigm, that'll attract them back".

    The reality is that I don't know anyone who wants, let alone needs, this new metaverse and throwing a $1,500 roadblock in the way of uptake wont do anything to change their minds.

    Facebook is so last decade and Metaverse will never be anything other than a black hole for Zuckies dollars.

    • [The] Metaverse will never be anything other than a black hole for Zuckies dollars.

      (insert Grumpy Cat "Good" meme here)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      It's for business. Presumably it's $1500 because Facebook thinks they can't mine it the same way they do the subsidized ones.

      Abandoning your consumer-directed VR device and releasing an expensive business-oriented one is a great strategy. Just ask Magic Leap.

    • Mark! Don't listen to NewtonsLaw! I think you are wonderful and certainly not an evil autistic robot! Metaverse is the future! You will make all the moneys! Sell off everything you have and pour the money into Metaverse which is what everyone is secretly longing to join!

  • $1,4999? What is that? (Score:3)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @07:42PM (#62958161)

    Look, I know Europeans and Americans are opposite in how they use commas and periods. I understand that the British use "billion" to mean a million million, rather than the American thousand million. But what the heck does $1,4999 mean? Is Zuckerface trying to reinvent math?

    • Is Zuckerface trying to reinvent math?

      Might as well get in with the "math is racist" crowd and make some money off of them before we kick them in the nads for saying 2+2=reeks of white supremacist patriarchy [professorwatchlist.org]

      • That profile is...interesting. I wonder how "she?" would respond if asked why the white supremacy that keeps the WNBA down doesn't cause the same issue for the NBA, that is likely just as much full of minorities. It seems like it is a completely incomplete thought, or something that was not thought out.

    • I understand that the British use "billion" to mean a million million, rather than the American thousand million.

      No they don't. The British formalised the short scale in the 1970s and used it long before then too. There's no english speaking countries anymore to my knowledge that use billion to mean million million.

      The only problem you're left with these days is translation from other languages. French, Spanish, German, Dutch, to name a few still use the words in the long scale (German example) Millionen, Milliarden, Billionen https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

  • can someone explain to me who told the Zukerbot that people actually want whatever it is he is peddling, who told him there was a market for this? I am actually curious, is there a market? I mean I missed a lot of things ( a LOT of things), like I never played any of those garden games, I don't use whatzup, I don't have an IG or a TikTook account, I am basically modern illiterate when it comes to social media, I didn't buy bitcoin at 2 dollars a piece and didn't sell it at 60,000, etc.etc. Is there actual

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by znrt ( 2424692 )

      Is there actually a market for people putting on 3d glasses and spending most of their time in 3d?

      i would predict a *huge* market for this if the device meets expectations. good enough ergonomics + cheap enough recording functionality + cheap enough display for the masses = social media fad supernova. huge is an understatement. i don't think they're there yet, though.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        One thing that occurs to me is the prospect of motion capture for actors. This may be a much more convenient approach to get rigging for the animations, and give the actor vision to a rough draft render of what they are interacting with. A niche to be sure, but trying to hunt for 'professional' clientele that might have reason to spend that much for face/eye tracking.

    • Facebook is Dead Man Walking.

      They need to try something.

  • I hope they can keep up with demand.

  • Still not ready (Score:3)

    by DavenH ( 1065780 ) on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @08:25PM (#62958279)
    I'll pay attention when it has 4x the resolution, 4x the battery life and 1/10th the cost. I'm sure the day's coming, but this iteration isn't going to open up the metaverse.
  • I bet if I read the article, it really costs 10X less

  • Fix the title 1,4999 is not a valid price :)

  • I cannot wait to spend 1500 to go check out some legs in the multiverse! Oh sweet sweet legs.

    • Ask them if there is a special leg-only account option. The legs they don't show in the default account must be piling up in storage somewhere, they may as well pipe them to you or they are just going to waste.

  • Wake me when that's supported and built in.

    • Elite Dangerous should be no problem.

      I haven't played a modern MechWarrior game, but there are equivilent VR games available.

      The Quest 2 supported ED through either a wired high speed USB-C cable, or through a wireless network, so I can't see why this one would lose that functionality.

      It is pretty amazing flying in ED in VR, the ship's cockpits look so much bigger, and the better depth perception comes in nice.

      • The problem with Mech Warriors is they don't go anywhere - The metaverse just doesn't have the legs.
  • Now feel free to stick it up there where the sun never shines.
  • If you want me to pay $1000 more for this than the previous headset with no extreme performance improvements, the damn thing better blow me while I'm working in VR.

    That's more than it costs me to get a Valve Index, which is all around a better headset with more options for both business and gaming. I am certainly not paying that premium for a different size and weight balance on the Quest Pro.
    • I think everyone is missing the point here. The partnership with Microsoft speaks volumes. They don't want you to buy this $1,500 unit, they want your employer to buy 100,000 units. Employers are not going to buy an Index for their entire staff; its a bad look. Meta has positioned themselves so that the games look secondary and companies can claim this is a productivity tool. All they really need are a couple large companies to drink the koolaid and they'll be able to limp along a few more years. Micr
      • That worked so well for HoloLens which is literally integrated with the OS most businesses use so why not try it with a far less-trusted third-party brand like Metabookulus for a worse price.
  • Does no one remember when Google came out with Glass and what wearers of said Glass were called?

    What will people who wear these new "augmented reality" headsets in public will be come known as:
    1. Metatards
    2. Facefuckers
    3. Zuckerzombies
  • I don't get why they don't have an app to access their metaverse and build audience first. It needs to be free. Then you build better hardware for it.

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