Meta Quest Pro, found in a hotel room before the official launch. PHOTO

The VR devices from Meta are the ones behind the dedicated metaverse technologies Mark Zuckerberg announced last year, and in the next few weeks we’ll be getting a new headset that’s better than the ones already released. After two generations of the affordable Oculus/Meta Quest with largely basic capabilities, Meta seems to be readying a “Quest Pro”, which appears to already be in the hands of someone outside the company, who seems to have found it in a hotel room, complete with the original box, before launch.

Meta’s next VR headset is the Quest Pro

Ramiro Cardenas found a fully packaged “Meta Quest Pro” in a box that appears to be similar to the Quest 2. The device has markings that suggest it’s an “engineering sample”, so it doesn’t have finalized hardware or software, but presumably in terms of design, pretty much everything is close to what we’ll see in stores. This one filmed an unboxing showing the new design (available on Facebook Reels), and it seems to show us something we’ve seen before. The footage was originally published on Reddit.

Meta has talked in the past about Project Cambria, a new standalone high-end VR device that doesn’t need a PC to operate. It is expected to improve both the processing power of Quest 2 and the resolution of the images displayed, as well as the sensors used to interact with the content.

It seems that with the new Quest Pro, Meta will also introduce new virtual reality controllers, which are now more compact than those of the past. It’s immediately apparent that the two circles above the “handles” are gone, suggesting that there’s now a more efficient position tracking system that doesn’t need as many IR LEDs as in the past. Magnetic connectors also appear on the back, suggesting that there is a magnetic charging cable or that a dock will also be available. Previously, Quest controllers used a regular AA battery each.

The images look real, and the device a real one, especially when you consider that we’re very close to an official Meta Connect event on October 11 dedicated to the company’s VR and AR devices. Last year at Connect, the Metaverse was announced and the name change from Facebook to Meta, and this year we can expect this new device and likely details and news about the company’s progress in the direction that was previously announced.