HAS VR’S TIME FINALLY COME?
WE’VE certainly been down this road before, but it’s time to ask the question again – has VR finally found its moment?
We ask only because Meta – owner of Facebook and Whatsapp – has released yet another standalone headset.
After switching branding from Oculus to Meta earlier this year, and following on from the Quest 2 headset, we now have a high-end system to join the party – Meta Quest Pro has arrived.
The first thing to say about it is it’s very expensive – if you want a set, you’ll have to pay £1,499 for the privilege.
Given Meta’s consumer VR set the Quest 2 goes for £349, the Pro level option is going to have to be something special.
To be fair to Meta, the comparison in price between the two headsets is perhaps harsh – The Quest 2 is being marketed very much as a games machine, while the Pro is supposed to be for work as well.
It has beefed-up specs internally, and has two features you don’t get on the Quest 2.
Firstly it’s designed to be an AR device as well as a VR device – it has a full-colour video feed of the outside world, onto which it can
superimpose info and graphics.
There’s also a system of facial tracking via some inward-facing cameras – it is able to recognise facial movements.
It looks very different to the Quest 2 – all black with a shiny front visor. The design of the device also differs so that the battery is at the back, which should mean better weight distribution than the front-heavy Quest 2 has.
The whole thing is powered by a Snapdragon XR2+ – a new chip that’s making its debut in a product here.
Meta is also promising clearer graphics, too, having ‘trimmed down the optic stack’ of lenses to make it 40% slimmer than on the Quest 2.
The handsets have also been reimagined. They are now more stand-alone devices – with the old Oculus headsets, the controllers had lights that could be tracked by the headset. The Quest Pro’s controllers have three cameras each, and a Snapdragon 662 processor, so should be much more capable.
So much for the specs – what can you actually do with it? Essentially it can do everything that the Quest 2 can do for a start – so it’s fully backwards compatible with all the software and games available for that device.
At the price, though, it’s firmly aimed at the enterprise market, and there’s no doubt that meetings
can be much more immersive in a VR space.
Meta’s own Workrooms are a key part of the company’s strategy to make the so-called Metaverse, a virtual world in which we might spend at least some of our working day, happen.
In these virtual meetings your personal avatar can take advantage of the facial recognition on the device, which will pick up and animate things like smiles. Another Workrooms feature is the ability to hook up a PC or MAC and project output from them on up to three giant monitors in your virtual world.
It remains to be seen, of course, just how attractive these new features are, and just how well the pass-through video AR feature works in real life.
And the big worries about standalone headsets seem to linger – the Meta Pro is still quite heavy at 722 grams, and the battery will also give only about two hours of use on a single charge.
There’s no swappable battery, like you find on the competitor from HTC, the Vive Focus 3 – this allows you to keep on working while charging your other battery.
On the face of it, then, it looks very much like another tiny step on the road to really useful VR usability – the software and the hardware are both making progress, but it seems like the Metaverse becoming a viable and useful reality remains some distance away.