Meta’s Quest Pro headset may actually make mixed reality mainstream

With a new Oculus Quest expected to come in just a few weeks, Meta is turning up the dial on its headset hype. Its latest teaser features a winning combination of swords, censorship, Olympic athletes, and naturally, Mark Zuckerberg himself.

Feast your eyes on Zuckerberg using Meta’s soon-to-be-released Quest Pro headset (a.k.a. Project Cambria) to face off against world-class fencers, Lee Kiefer and Gerek Meinhardt in the metaverse.

Sword of blurry — While technically Meta’s Oculus Quest Pro makes an appearance in the clip, the headset is, like previous teasers, blurred out properly. Even behind the dense pixelation, however, we get further affirmation on a few things, including the headset’s general size and some design quirks.

The Quest Pro will lack overhead straps like those used in the Quest 2, opting for a single-band strap that wraps around the sides of a wearer’s head. Think swimming goggles, not a hard hat.

The back of the headset will come with a fairly chunky pad-like stopper which (we presume) is meant to help keep the headset fixed on one’s head (and maybe house the battery). If the Oculus Quest Pro is as pricey as rumors would suggest (between $800 and $1,500, yikes), having some kind of extra prevention from droppage is probably a smart move.

Perhaps the biggest insight from the teaser is just how well the Quest Pro can render mixed reality. The prototype fencing game demoed by Zuckerberg and friends appears to render everyone’s environment in high resolution. The Quest 2, in contrast, was only capable of giving wearers a pretty rudimentary black-and-white “passthrough” view of their surroundings — a feature best suited for technical tasks, like setting Guardian boundaries.

The addition of three cameras on the front of the Quest Pro, however, clearly (emphasis on the clear part) changes the game.

The hype hypens — While there’s nothing absolutely groundbreaking in the Quest Pro teaser, if mixed reality ends up being as crisp and clear as the demo would suggest, Meta is well on its way to delivering a truly next-gen headset, one that should make its dreams of an immersive metaverse less of a moonshot.

We won’t have to wait for long on a definitive answer about the Quest Pro’s chops. Meta is gearing up for its annual Connect conference on October 11, where it’s expected to unveil the headset. The Quest 3 — a cheaper and less powerful headset — is slated for sometime next year.

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