Aight, I have a Meta Quest Pro to test now, so here are my first-day impression. I haven’t updated away from the bottom line of this post, though a few things were better and a few things were worse than I expected.
They really knocked it out of the park with the pass-through cameras. While wearing the headset under typical indoor lighting, I can see the regular world about as well as I see it without my glasses (I’m nearsighted −2.75).
The underside is open, rather than covered, which makes it much easier to peak out eg to check your phone compared to Quest 2. A side-effect of this is that you can see the same object in both normal and pass-through vision at the same time, and verify that it lines up perfectly.
Text clarity improved more than I expected (they improved the optics, but didn’t significantly increase the panel pixel density). The minimum acceptable font size is now a font size that most people (without my unusual preference for small fonts) would find to be normal.
I haven’t found someone else with a Quest Pro yet to try out eye contact and face tracking in a call, but I was able to try it out on an avatar in a mirror. Eye direction, blinking, winking work, and most mouth movements work. Eyebrows don’t move, sticking out your tongue doesn’t come through, and I don’t think it can distinguish real smiles from fake smiles. Translated onto a slightly cartoonish avatar, this is enough to get me over the uncanny valley.
The weight distribution is good, with the thinner front and the battery moved to the back, but I don’t like the head strap (compared to the Quest 2 Elite Strap I was using). It puts too much of the headset’s weight onto too small an area of the forehead, and as a shear rather than a compression. I think it can be remedied with an aftermarket modification to add a fabric strap across the top, but the strap is much less customizable/replaceable than it was on Quest 2. This seems like a major weak point and some people will probably find it to be a dealbreaker for extended use.
I paired it with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, opened a web browser and tried it as a laptop replacement, and it Just Worked. (Choice of a virtual environment with hands, keyboard, and browser window visibile, or pass-through camera with a browser window floating in virtualized physical space. Caveat that transferring a keyboard into a virtual environment with computer vision only works for a whitelist of supported keyboard models, and I was lucky in that the first keyboard I tried happened to be a supported one). It’s not at a level where I’d choose it over my Macbook Pro under normal circumstances, but it’s within striking distance, and I *would* use it that way if I was stuck in an airplane seat without room to properly angle a laptop screen, or looking at something highly confidential in a public place.
The controller tracking is solid. It’s the same experience as Quest 2, except the dead zones are gone, as are the bulky tracking rings.
Aight, I have a Meta Quest Pro to test now, so here are my first-day impression. I haven’t updated away from the bottom line of this post, though a few things were better and a few things were worse than I expected.
They really knocked it out of the park with the pass-through cameras. While wearing the headset under typical indoor lighting, I can see the regular world about as well as I see it without my glasses (I’m nearsighted −2.75).
The underside is open, rather than covered, which makes it much easier to peak out eg to check your phone compared to Quest 2. A side-effect of this is that you can see the same object in both normal and pass-through vision at the same time, and verify that it lines up perfectly.
Text clarity improved more than I expected (they improved the optics, but didn’t significantly increase the panel pixel density). The minimum acceptable font size is now a font size that most people (without my unusual preference for small fonts) would find to be normal.
I haven’t found someone else with a Quest Pro yet to try out eye contact and face tracking in a call, but I was able to try it out on an avatar in a mirror. Eye direction, blinking, winking work, and most mouth movements work. Eyebrows don’t move, sticking out your tongue doesn’t come through, and I don’t think it can distinguish real smiles from fake smiles. Translated onto a slightly cartoonish avatar, this is enough to get me over the uncanny valley.
The weight distribution is good, with the thinner front and the battery moved to the back, but I don’t like the head strap (compared to the Quest 2 Elite Strap I was using). It puts too much of the headset’s weight onto too small an area of the forehead, and as a shear rather than a compression. I think it can be remedied with an aftermarket modification to add a fabric strap across the top, but the strap is much less customizable/replaceable than it was on Quest 2. This seems like a major weak point and some people will probably find it to be a dealbreaker for extended use.
I paired it with a bluetooth mouse and keyboard, opened a web browser and tried it as a laptop replacement, and it Just Worked. (Choice of a virtual environment with hands, keyboard, and browser window visibile, or pass-through camera with a browser window floating in virtualized physical space. Caveat that transferring a keyboard into a virtual environment with computer vision only works for a whitelist of supported keyboard models, and I was lucky in that the first keyboard I tried happened to be a supported one). It’s not at a level where I’d choose it over my Macbook Pro under normal circumstances, but it’s within striking distance, and I *would* use it that way if I was stuck in an airplane seat without room to properly angle a laptop screen, or looking at something highly confidential in a public place.
The controller tracking is solid. It’s the same experience as Quest 2, except the dead zones are gone, as are the bulky tracking rings.