Going pro

We were not wowed by our first Meta Quest Pro experience

Best Buy demo doesn't put Meta's best foot forward.

Kyle Orland – Oct 24, 2022 9:04 PM | 177

Even virtual reality's biggest boosters may hesitate at the idea of spending nearly $1,500 for the Meta Quest Pro without trying it first. Fortunately, a retail partnership means that people can try the upcoming Quest Pro at select Best Buy locations during weekend demos.

After checking out one of those demos, though, we came away largely unimpressed with our first experience. Even if the Quest Pro's new features end up justifying its massive price (and more time with a retail unit later this week should help answer that question fully), our retail demo did not put Meta's best foot forward.

Where do I go?

Upon entering Best Buy in Columbia, Maryland, on Sunday, I didn't find any signage suggesting that there was any special VR demo going on inside the store. Instead, I had to search the aisles until I found a lonely Quest display in an unloved back corner of the store, complete with a Quest 2 and Quest Pro under glass. Nearby, a demo staffer leaned on a counter playing with his phone next to a demo unit in a charging stand. When I approached, he said I was the first person all weekend who had expressed any interest in a demo (though one more came to see what it was about while I was in the headset).

The Meta Quest kiosk sitting in an unloved corner of a local Best Buy, complete with Quest Pro display.

Ars Video

There was no special room or specific area set aside for the Quest demo at the store. Instead, the demo staffer awkwardly guided me to a small section of bare carpet where I stood unceremoniously between a tower of retail shelving and a pile of boxed 4K TVs. When shoppers and workers ended up crossing through that area during my setup, I got redirected to another section of carpet even further toward the corner of the store. There, I had to set up my own virtual "guardian" to mark the safe operating space and highlight walls and other obstructions for various "augmented reality" experiences.

To make matters worse, about 15 minutes into my demo, a peaceful meditation session in Tripp VR was interrupted by an abrupt "powering down" message when the headset ran out of charge. The demo staffer apologized, saying the unit "was at zero percent when I got it" and hadn't been plugged in for very long before our demo. I took a quick shopping break and came back to a fully charged unit, but the Quest Pro still largely botched its one chance at a first impression.

A Quest for comfort

Demo-specific issues aside, the Quest Pro is noticeably more comfortable than previous Quest headsets. The flimsy straps on those earlier units have been replaced with a thick headband and large, semicircular cushions that rest on the forehead and the back of the skull. Once it's wrapped around your eyes, an easy-to-turn knob in the rear gets a fit that feels secure without being too tight.

This new design means the "ski goggles" pressure that old Quest headsets exert on the area around your eyes is almost completely gone here. While the Quest Pro exerted a little bit of pressure on the bridge of my nose, it was no more distracting than wearing a pair of sunglasses. I could even reach up and scratch my nose without taking off the headset, thanks to a new open-bottomed design that allows much better airflow as well (the demo unit did have magnetic "blinders" preinstalled on the sides, though, to eliminate real-world distractions. I had to ask to have them popped off).

While I only spent about an hour total in the Quest Pro during my demo, I felt like I could have kept it on indefinitely without complaining.

The Quest Pro also has some nice quality-of-life improvements when it comes to getting the headset positioned for perfect visual focus. The headset's inward-facing cameras automatically detected my interpupillary distance and told me to adjust the system's lenses inward to match (which I did by simply reaching up through the bottom of the headset and sliding in a smooth but solid motion). The headset also told me that it was sitting too low in front of my eyes and that I should tilt it upward and retighten for a better view.

With everything in focus, though, I have to say I was more than a little underwhelmed with the Quest Pro's display. While the image was perhaps a little sharper than I was used to on previous Quest headsets, it was a far cry from the clarity boost you'd expect from a high-end headset. The change was most apparent in my peripheral vision, where images remained crisp and clear with no distortion even when casting sideward glances at the limits of the display.

My first experience with the full-color passthrough camera was not a good one, either—my view of the outside world jittered back and forth a few apparent inches as I tried to set up my playspace. While the issues corrected themselves relatively quickly, it was still a jarring start to the experience.

All business?

The staffer running my demo told me that the Quest Pro is "more for business," and thus that they were "not really focusing on the games" for this retail demo. That said, the closest thing in the demo to what most people would consider a "work" app was Immersed, a "desktop + coworking" app that lets you place multiple monitors of any size that can float around your virtual space.

Unfortunately, without a linked computer or any linked 2D apps in the headset, I was only able to try out the (very unresponsive) stock web browser. And without a Bluetooth mouse or keyboard, scrolling and typing was not a natural experience.

I also got to play around with Shapes XR and Figmin XR, two apps focused on drawing or making models in a kind of mixed-reality 3D world. The Quest Pro's full-color passthrough camera adds a kind of "gee-whiz" novelty to the now-familiar idea of creating 3D art in a VR space—I had fun conjuring a pre-made watermelon model, growing it to an absurd size, and then throwing it at my unsuspecting demo staffer, for instance. We could see specific kinds of creative professionals doing some interesting augmented reality collaborations with this.

The closest thing to a game in the limited set of demo apps was The World Beyond, a tech demo where you use a ray gun to find a cute little alien hiding "behind" the real world in your passthrough camera view. The little catlike creature responded to thrown balls and simple spoken commands but wasn't that engaging for more than a few minutes.

I finished my demo with DJ turntable simulator TribeXR, which presented me with a full 3D model of a digital turntable with a baffling array of knobs and levers. A somewhat game-like tutorial used lines of floating green balls to show me when and where to use these controls to mix some toe-tapping beats. That said, the short tutorial did a poor job explaining what each control does or how to make my own mixes independent of the guides.

We'll have more to say about Quest VR after reviewing a retail unit in the Ars orbital HQ later this week. For now, though, there was nothing about the version presented at this retail demo that would convince us to put down enough money to buy nearly the equivalent cost of four Quest 2 headsets.

Kyle Orland Senior Gaming Editor

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

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