Mark Zuckerberg reveals Meta Quest Pro at triple the price of Quest 2

Today during Meta Connect, a streaming event watched by 13,000 people at its peak, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out his next steps in his vision of the metaverse that has so far cost his company his name and a whole lot of stock value.

The main attraction of the event was the announcement of the Meta Quest Pro, a new VR headset that aims to be a leap forward in technology, but at an extremely high price. The Meta Quest Pro will retail for $1,500, more than 3x the price of a $500 Meta Quest 2 with a 256GB hard drive and nearly 4x the price of a $400 128 -GB hard drive. And both recently increased their prices by $100 each, citing global economic factors.

The new premium headset, which is lighter, has thinner lenses and more AR capabilities, is intended for corporate use and for “prosumers”, ie. those who don’t mind being early adopters to test cutting-edge technology.

Much of the presentation was just for continued investment in a number of areas that Metas Metaversum has already bet on. More games, though two of the most prominent offerings didn’t show a single second of actual footage, including an upcoming Iron Man game. Some fitness stuff, and of course a lot of work-based initiatives, including polished integration with Microsoft products from Office to Teams, and a testimonial from Accenture showing off the Metaverse room they built for the Quest.

An entire segment was devoted to upcoming avatar enhancements that will come at an undetermined point in the future, including Snapchat-like abilities that link your facial movements to your character, and the long-awaited character rival that actually has legs in VR space Has. instead of simply floating virtual torsos. They later showed off photo-realistic, motion-detected “codec” avatars using an entirely different kind of technology, though with no guarantees that they would ever fully make it to the public in time.

Regarding the march towards Metaverse mass adoption, I’m not sure what is intended here to materially further that goal. Yes, it seems like Meta Quest Pro is being used to test technologies that will eventually be made cheaper and more accessible when Meta Quest 3 comes out. But for now, most consumers, even avid VR users, won’t be able to afford a new headset that costs three or four times as much as the current one. Expensive VR technology is nothing new. Probably the most immersive VR experience out there is Half Life Alyx, a game developed for Valve’s pricey Index headset. But that did little to advance VR’s overall goals.

There was also a whole segment about AR through high-tech goggles, and while there has been mention of Meta’s Horizon coming to desktops, it remains very clear that Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse is heavily dependent on VR/AR, while rivals viz immersive video games don’t need that as a requirement. At the time of writing, we have not received any update on the sales of Quest 2 (15 million at last count) or Horizon players (300,000 monthly at last count), both in terms of hardware and everything related to video games seem to be eclipsed. Software and monthly players. It’s not that Meta hasn’t carved a solid niche, it’s just that a trillion-dollar company focused on the Metaverse badly needs it to become big more than just a niche.

The vast majority of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse vision is to socialize with friends, play mini-games, and go to work meetings in virtual space. Even as the technology improves, the use cases remain a bit unconvincing. A recent NYT deep dive into the Metaverse came out with a report concluding that it felt like an AOL chat room most of the time, and according to The Verge, Meta staff need to be assigned more time in the Metaverse spend because they just aren’t doing it on their own.

This technology should only continue to improve over time, but it’s unclear how patient Meta’s investors are here. Debuting a high-priced headset and offering some undated enhancements for avatars and AR goggles doesn’t seem like something that’s going to kick the metaverse into higher gear. Let’s see what the next year brings until next Meta Connect tries again to reassure us about the metaverse.

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