Meta’s Latest VR Headset

MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) -It’s so shinny and the price tag is sure to get your attention too.

Meta’s newest virtual-reality headset, the Meta Quest Pro. It’s a slick and powerful device that boasts high-resolution sensors as well as eye tracking and “natural facial expressions” that mimic the your facial movements so your avatars seem more natural when interacting with other avatars.

Meta boss, Mark Zuckerberg calling it the next major step for VR.

One of the most noteworthy new features on the Quest Pro is its ability to track the wearer’s eyes and face — something that may make people feel more present when interacting with other avatars in virtual spaces. To do this, the headset uses five infrared sensors to capture details like where you gaze and whether you sneer, smile, frown, or raise an eyebrow. This tracking is turned off by default; Meta also said that it’s processing eye and face images on the headset and then deleting them, and that this will be the case even for developers who add this tracking to their apps.

The black headset, which Meta unveiled on Tuesday during an online event, is probably not in your price range. At $1,500 ($1,499.99, to be precise), it costs nearly four times that of the company’s cheapest Quest 2 headset. Its price, power, and potential are aimed more toward businesses — think architects and designers — with pockets deep enough to shell out for the headset, and some creative and die-hard VR users.

Buyers can pre-order the Quest Pro as of Tuesday, and it will ship out on October 25. It can be purchased online directly from Meta, and in the United States it can also be bought at Best Buy stores, via Best Buy’s website, and through Amazon.

The capabilities of the Quest Pro mark an important milestone for Meta (and for CEO Mark Zuckerberg), which has spent years and billions of dollars steering toward a future where it believes people will spend more and more time in virtual spaces and mixing digital elements with the real world.

It’s not clear whether — or how — this powerful device will help Meta popularize the so-called Metaverse, which is an immersive virtual environment where people can enter a place virtually rather than just staring at it on a screen.

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