Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has confirmed on the Joe Rogan Experience that the next VR headset from subsidiary Oculus will be revealed in October. We’re not sure if it’ll be named the Meta Quest Pro (which seems to be the popular name for it), but all signs indicate that it’ll be more powerful than the Meta Quest 2.
While Joe Rogan’s podcast is mostly garbage, laced with COVID-19 misinformation and the odd controversial guest, it sometimes gives us something pretty juicy. Today, it has given us the scoop on the new Meta VR headset.
“So your new Oculus is awesome, very impressive,” said Joe Rogan when opening the podcast.
“Yeah it’s very cool, coming out in October,” Zuckerberg responded, as robotically as you can probably imagine.
Not because I’m lazy, but I will now drop a full quote of Rogan recounting his own experience with the new headset, as it serves both as a pretty good summary of what you’d expect from the Joe Rogan Experience and what we might be in for with the new headset:
“It’s so interesting the, when you put it on, so I’ll just describe it to people, when you put it on there was an avatar in front of me and it was an alien woman. And the alien woman, when I moved my mouth, she moved her mouth. When I moved my eyes left and right, she… [hand gestures] ‘tracking my eyes’. When I make an angry face like, grr [angry face], it makes an angry face. When you go ‘ooo!’ [open mouth] it’s incredible.”
Human translation: it sounds like the Meta Quest Pro will support some form of eye and face tracking.
Known by VR enthusiasts as “Project Cambria”, the upcoming headset has been teased for a while. Back in October 2021, Project Cambria was reported to have face and eye tracking when Meta released this hype video.
The tech was also expected to have automatic room mapping and the ability to lock a 3D object in a virtual space.
Now, a year later, Meta seems ready to release the headset.
Personally, I’m pretty excited for this headset. I’m a fan of the Meta Quest 2 (despite the recent price rise): while VR is absolutely not for everyone (even enthusiasts get dizzy and overwhelmed from it), it’ll be nice to see some extra features available from Meta.
Face and eye tracking don’t sound particularly useful to me. Maybe for Meta’s internally built VR app, Horizon Worlds (which looks like garbage), but outside of that I’m struggling to imagine ever benefitting from it.
Supposedly it’s to help people feel “present with each other”, according to Zuckerberg, a normal man who feels emotions, on the podcast.
Meta will reveal more about the Quest Pro at the company’s upcoming Connect conference. A solid date hasn’t been confirmed.
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