Oculus Quest Pro unboxing gives us the first real look at the new headset

What you need to know

• Meta's next VR headset was left in a hotel room, according to the story given on social media, but has since been returned to its rightful owner.
• The short unboxing posted on the internet showed off the new smaller headset that appears to ship without a VR light blocker.
• The Meta Quest Pro's new controllers are smaller and have cameras in place of the traditional tracking ring.

Meta's next VR headset was left in a hotel room for someone to find, and it's been unboxed in all its glory for the internet to see. Ramiro Cardenas, who goes by Zectariuz Gaming on his Facebook Gaming page, posted an unboxing along with a story of how he found the headset but has since returned it to its rightful owner. Thankfully, he took a look at what was in the box before giving it back.

The Meta Quest Pro is Meta's next AR/VR headset and is not a direct follow-up to the Oculus Quest 2. Rather, it looks to be designed for consumers looking for a more premium headset, as well as businesses and other folks who primarily want AR passthrough — better known as mixed reality — which can layer digital images on top of what you see in the real world. It's expected to be fully unveiled at Meta's Connect conference next month.

The video, which you can view above, has since been taken down from Zectariuz Gaming's Facebook page but has been reposted in several places. While it's a very short minute-long video, it gives us an important look at the headset and confirmation of some of the new tech going into Meta's new headset.

First, of course, is the headset, which is substantially thinner than the Quest 2. Based on the unboxing, the Meta Quest Pro ships without any sort of light-blocking facial interface — which is normally intended to block the view of the real world in order to create total immersion for VR purposes — and shows that Meta is primarily aiming the Quest Pro at folks looking for great AR or mixed-reality experiences.

Meta previously said that the Quest Pro would be backward compatible with all Quest 2 games, and it's likely they would run in some sort of enhanced super-resolution mode on the new headset. Meta is likely using pancake lenses to make the headset much thinner, which act a bit like mirrors bouncing light between each other, reducing the space between the display and the lenses themselves.

The controllers in the unboxing look identical to a leak we saw last year, which can be seen in the image above. These new controllers are substantially sleeker than the current crop of VR controllers, as they don't have a tracking ring at all. Instead, at least one camera can be seen at the top and at the front of each controller, although it's likely there might be one more located somewhere else that we didn't see in the video.

The controllers appear to have the same number and general configuration of buttons as the Quest 2's controllers, but the cameras on-board mean these are self-tracked controllers. That's a new type of tracking that we haven't yet seen on a commercial headset. The Quest 2 and the upcoming PS VR2 use what's called inside-out tracking, which places cameras on the VR headset that can see infrared lights in the controllers to track them.

Self-tracked controllers would likely be a more ideal form of tracking as they wouldn't have the same sort of dead zones that inside-out tracking do, meaning the controllers won't get lost when they go above a player's head or behind their back. It's entirely likely that the battery life on these controllers won't be nearly as good as the Quest 2 controllers, which typically last a few months on a single AA battery.