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- Imagine a future
where your workplace is virtual.
You don't need a big screen display
because you can put virtual monitors anywhere.
Instead of a set of Zoom squares,
you can meet your colleagues in a virtual beach side resort
where your avatars will reflect your real face.
It can feel just like coming into the office
but from the comfort of your home.
- And then I've lost my hands again.
Hey, I got my hands back.
(Nilay laughs)
I'm gonna be honest with you, Adi.
I hate this.
I hate it more than anything.
- I feel so beaten down by the software.
The Meta Quest Pro is supposed to be a big leap forward
for the company, formerly known as Facebook.
Meta has lost 9.4 billion this year
on virtual and augmented reality,
or the so-called metaverse.
And since we started recording this video,
Meta's laid off 11,000 employees or 13% of its workforce.
But in his address to the company,
Zuckerberg said he's still focusing
on high priority growth areas like the Metaverse.
It's betting everything, right down to its name.
This is where Meta's VR goes from fun and games
to a serious business tool.
Eventually, CEO Mark Zuckerberg
wants something like the Quest Pro
to be your next laptop.
The Quest Pro is like a very fancy version of the Quest Two,
the all in one headset that Meta released in 2020.
Like the Quest Two, the Quest Pro is a self-contained system
with built-in cameras and tracking.
It supports Quest Two apps and games
and it uses the same app store.
You still need a Meta account to start using it
unless your workplace sets up its own login system.
Most of it's internal specs
have gotten a slight bump though.
It uses a new Qualcomm XR Two Plus chip set
instead of the Quest Two's XR Two
and it's got 12 gigabytes of memory
instead of six gigabytes.
The Quest Two controllers featured LED bands
that the headsets built-in cameras could track.
Now the controllers have their own tracking camera.
I haven't noticed a huge improvement in their accuracy
mostly because the Quest Two was already quite good
but they're more compact and they finally charge
on a little plastic dock with the headset
instead of burning through AA batteries.
Where the Quest Two blocked out
most of the light around your face,
the Quest Pro offers more options.
By default, it lets in a lot of light
so people can't, say sneak up on you and surprise you in VR.
You'd be surprised how often that happens.
But it comes with rubber wings
that you can magnetically snap on
to block your peripheral vision
and you can buy a separate full face mask
that shuts out almost all light.
The default option here is okay
if you're sitting still at a desk,
which is how Meta imagines many people using it.
But it made me motion sick for anything else
even typically comfortable games like Beat Saber.
So I appreciate the flexibility
but I spent almost all my time with those wings on.
The main difference here though is the headsets cameras.
The Quest Two has four tracking cameras, one on each corner
and they capture black and white video.
The Quest Pro has a total of 10 sensors
including outward facing color cameras
and internal ones that capture your eyes and face.
All these cameras enable the Quest Pro's
two big selling points.
The first is color passthrough mixed reality,
a midpoint between full immersive VR and AR glasses,
where virtual items are overlaid on a live video feed.
We couldn't directly film past their video.
Meta says support to capture it
is coming in future software updates.
The second is face and eye tracking
which lets an avatar mirror facial expressions
like smiling and raising an eyebrow.
- You look like you're sleeping all the time.
- Yeah, no, it doesn't recognize that my eyes are open.
- Which is weird.
(Nilay laughs)
Okay, there is something to be said about this experience.
- Eye tracking also allows foveated rendering
where software can render the pixels
right where you're looking at more sharply
saving on computing power.
These are interesting new features
but so far there isn't a lot to do with them.
Foveated rendering could make more demanding games
render with more detail
but the Quest Pro isn't meant for games right now.
So most VR developers will be building for the Quest Two.
The color feed is a step up
from the Quest Two's black and white,
but it's still washed out and flickery,
a long way from looking like the real world.
There are some mixed reality apps
but the mixed reality component often remains pretty basic.
Meanwhile, Meta's main use for eye and face tracking
is its own social platforms,
particularly Horizon Workrooms.
Workrooms is at the heart of Meta's new strategy.
It's an app that you can sync
with a desktop computer to use as an office.
For personal work, you can project big screens
in front of your face on top of either a full VR environment
or a pass through video feed.
For collaboration, you can invite other people
to a virtual meeting room
but Workrooms, it has some problems.
- So this is the first time
we've been able to make Horizon Workrooms work.
We've tried it many times.
It has mostly failed out, but here we are together.
- I would like to caveat
that there's supposed to be a third person here with us
so I'm not sure I would say worked.
- That's true.
Alex Heath was unable to join us.
The face tracking is somewhat working.
Adi looks very sleepy all the time.
I am talking with my hands. - The face tracking
is also better than I expected,
even though it's not great in a lot of ways.
- Yeah, but it's like it's on the curve
so it's not good enough
that you are not talking with your hands.
Like I'm overcompensating with my hands.
- Yes.
- [Nilay] I cannot tell what your face is actually doing
because you keep winking and squinting at me.
- Yes.
I don't know, maybe this just exaggerates
all of our normal expressions
so we can see how weird we look all the time.
I don't know.
These are thoughts that I feel like would be weird
for a work meeting, so...
- There is zero chance that I would ever
make a serious decision in this software.
- It is bizarre that I have,
bizarre that I have for years
been connecting my Meta headset
to things related to Facebook
so that I can have a seamless social experience
so that I can have like, oh, isn't it great
that you can take advantage of the social graph?
I have to go to a website,
log in through an arcane-like authentication system
that even I don't understand where my account is.
I get on the web, I create a meeting room
I invite people to the meeting room through,
similarly I have no idea how or where
or where these accounts are.
And then maybe, maybe they get a link
and then they can click on the link
and then they launch themselves into the headset
and maybe it works.
As I said before, the Quest Pro's focus
is business collaboration.
So we're spending our most of our time
in Meta's Workrooms app
but the social app, Horizon Worlds
is a big part of Meta's metaverse strategy
a free VR platform for games, events and social hangouts.