What you need to know
- What appears to be leaked marketing videos reveal Facebook's plans for the Oculus Quest Pro, the follow-up to the Oculus Quest 2.
- The new headset appears to feature a new strap design, a separate battery compartment on the back, a smaller face-mounted portion, and additional cameras for full-body tracking.
- New controllers appear in the videos, showing off a total redesign that features no halo ring, onboard cameras for inside-out tracking, and a new charging dock.
Hot on the heels of the one-year anniversary of the Oculus Quest 2, a huge Oculus Quest Pro leak reveals some of the biggest features of the next rumored upcoming headset from Facebook. This leak comes from @Basti564 on Twitter and includes what appear to be official marketing videos for the Oculus Quest Pro.
In the series of four videos, Oculus avatars can be seen interacting with a mouse and keyboard, collaborating in a virtual workspace, playing Beat Saber with friends, and swapping out their look in the avatar creator.
The video containing the avatar editor also shows off a new full-body motion tracking feature, which appears to enable the bottom half of the avatar to move around freely. Previously, Oculus avatars would let you create a character with pants and shoes, but the bottom half of your character wouldn't be displayed in titles like Facebook's VR social network Horizon Worlds.
Full-body tracking appears to require a mirror to properly work, and it seems that the headset and the new controllers all carry additional cameras to help track your play space, help full-body tracking work even when you're turned around, and possibly enable better tracking with the Oculus Touch controllers.
Those new Oculus Touch controllers — that's the fourth generation now — look to feature a much different design than what we've seen in the past. For starters, the halo ring around the controller is completely gone, replaced with onboard cameras on several different parts of the controller, presumably to track their space in the room in the same way the headset does.
Likely, there's some additional processing done on-board these controllers if they're going to be pulling that kind of visual tracking data. In addition to that, it looks like the bottom part of the controller can act as a stylus or some other similar functionality in VR, as one of the characters in the video uses it to circle something on a virtual whiteboard.
The headset itself has also seen some significant refinements, sporting a much smaller form factor on the front and what looks to be a dedicated battery compartment on the back of the headset. It's also got a head strap that looks more like the Elite Strap for the Quest 2.
These two factors would help more evenly distribute weight and help reduce the thermal load on the processing portion of the headset, allowing Facebook to pack in more powerful processors and better cooling solutions. On top of that, it looks like there's an official charging dock that both the Oculus Quest Pro and the Oculus Touch controllers will dock into.
Two weeks ago, Facebook Reality Labs VP Andrew Bosworth teased the headset without saying what it was. Facebook Connect — Facebook's annual AR/VR conference — takes place on October 28 and we could very well see an Oculus Quest Pro announcement at the conference.
Proud of the research Michael Abrash's team is working on at FRL-R Redmond—excited to get an early look at some of the technologies that will underpin the metaverse (we work on several prototype headsets to prove out concepts, this is one of them. Kind of. It's a long story.) pic.twitter.com/Yi9xjy5HmGProud of the research Michael Abrash's team is working on at FRL-R Redmond—excited to get an early look at some of the technologies that will underpin the metaverse (we work on several prototype headsets to prove out concepts, this is one of them. Kind of. It's a long story.) pic.twitter.com/Yi9xjy5HmG— Boz (@boztank) October 13, 2021October 13, 2021
