Meta officially announces Quest Pro premium VR headset as your next productivity tool

At its Connect 2022 event today, Meta unveiled its new premium VR headset. The Quest Pro sits alongside the rest of the Quest range, offering VR headsets at different price points. Long-awaited by fans, this new headset shapes itself as a productivity tool rather than for gaming in virtual worlds. Ready to ramp things up? Meta reckons strapping these goggles to your face will help.

For the Quest Pro, Meta has taken the lower-tier Quest 2 headset, and turned things up to eleven. All the way down to the lenses, Meta has redesigned the headset. The lenses themselves use 40% thinner tech than the previous headset, resulting in a significant reduction in size. This should make the headset lighter, but this remains to be seen.

Also new to the Quest Pro is a full-colour Passthrough mode. This is the same Passthrough feature that lets you see your surroundings from other Quest headsets, but now in colour rather than black and white. Meta’s new headset does this thanks to the four on-board cameras. You’ll be able to use this in mixed reality experiences, using AR tech to embed virtual elements on top of real life.

Powering the headset is a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2+ chipset, the latest and greatest available. Each lens boasts a 1800 × 1920 mini-LED display, for more immersive graphics. The Quest Pro offers 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, offering more flexibility. You’ll also find eye-tracking in addition to the suite of other sensors previous headsets have packed in. The controllers that go alongside the headset have also been redesigned, as expected from previous leaks. Gone are the tracking rings, instead replaced with cameras to track the controls’ position.

However, the Quest Pro comes with a big black mark against its name – battery life. Meta reckons you’ll get between one and two hours of battery out of the new headset (which is a best-case-scenario). This is around half that of the Quest 2, which definitely irks at the higher price point. This is obviously due to the new hardware inside and extra features, but it seems like a big trade-off to make. We see this causing problems, especially for any productivity workflows as intended.

If Meta’s Quest Pro catches your eye, you can pre-order the headset from Meta starting today. It retails for $1500/£1500, and will begin shipping on 25 October. The headset is dubbed for pros, but such a high price tag might be a tough pill to swallow this early in VR’s life.