The Meta Quest Pro viewer arrives with autonomous operation and facial capture for avatars with a price of €1,799

There were no surprises. As the leaks of recent weeks progressed, Meta announced at the event that today it has dedicated its new and most advanced headset to date to its new virtual reality products: Quest Pro. Described as the beginning of a new range of professionally oriented products, Meta Quest Pro will provide features that are not aligned with the rest of the company’s virtual reality catalogue, offering its own characteristics and greater performance.

In essence a highly evolved and enhanced Quest 2, Quest Pro places special emphasis on comfort, incorporating a new curved battery and redesigned controls that can even be used to draw or write in virtual spaces using something that could be compared to pen tips that They connect at the base. Even more interesting is the optical recognition system, which using two sensors is capable of detecting facial and eye movements to accurately represent the user’s avatar.

In practice, this means that the Quest Pro can reproduce gestures such as winks, smiles or pouts of disgust without the need to press a button, just by looking at the wearer’s face. The idea is to facilitate collaborative work, which will now be extended with a new SDK that has already been adopted by applications such as Zoom.

This increased focus on user representation and professional use is reflected in the use of high-quality LCD screens with 1800 x 1920 pixel resolution per eye; same as Quest 2, but with 75% contrast enhancement and reduced grid effect. It also benefits from a much slimmer optical assembly, which in turn results in a less bulky viewfinder.

These screens will be doubly used, since Quest Pro offers as a novelty the possibility of observing the exterior using high-resolution color cameras, when until now Meta only offered exterior vision of mediocre quality and in black and white. It falls short of delivering a high-quality HoloLens-style mixed reality experience, but it doesn’t claim to either, as its focus remains on the metaverse.

Finally, and like Quest 2, we find ourselves before a viewer of the autonomous type, and therefore free of cables. Something quite adequate if we consider the intended use. Logically, its hardware is much higher than that of the model from which it descends, and thus we find a Snapdragon XR2+ chipset accompanied by 12 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage. Meta has not provided a battery estimate.

Meta Quest Pro can now be booked at a price in Spain of €1,799 and estimated delivery for October 25. Meta Quest 2, by the way, will continue to be on sale unchanged, now with a greater emphasis on gaming and sports applications.