Quest Pro Was Meta's Missed Opportunity To Prove The Future
Quest Pro Was Meta's Missed Opportunity To Prove The Future
Quest Pro wasn't a bad idea, it was just poor execution. With Apple Vision Pro priced at $3500, here's why Meta should try again:
“Making people want to afford it before making it affordable” will likely go down as the smartest move Apple is making with the AVP.
It underscores how bad Meta's marketing has really been I think. They try but I actually find their ads for Quest off putting. They could learn from Apple and pitch to a broader market with some pretty basic things (viewing movies etc) and easily present a very compelling narrative I think (for example: with 1 Vision Pro you can watch a movie all by yourself and be lonely but for the same price you can buy 7 Quest 3's and have your whole family or friends there with you - this shouldn't be a hard sell!).
Totally. Even with the whole "metaverse" and idea that Quest transports you into a virtual world and you can live your life in that world....how is that meant to be appealing? And the fact that it is coming from Zuck makes people know that they want you in THEIR virtual world.
But Apple focused their pitch on using AVP the same way you'd use your iphone, ipad, or mac - as a screen that allows you to interface with digital content. Only for the AVP, that screen is AR.
If that is such a great idea why is Quest doing so extremely well compared to PCVR right now?
I think the issue is more that we need both. There will not be any incentive for anyone to make any VR software if there are not users and clearly even the current VR headsets are of interest to enough people that you can build a market if you have a price they can afford.
Meta exclusively focusing on Quest and dropping Rift completely was what really was bad for VR.
I'm pretty sure that was the idea for the quest pro, too.
My guess is that Meta thought they could deliver high quality passthrough with just the tracking cameras, if not at launch, then later via an update.
They pulled off similar tricks with the Quest one and two, which added link and hand tracking via software updates. Also, Meta knows a lot about computer vision.
Maybe they still will, but the fact that the Q3 has a depth sensor makes me think it turned out to be harder than they thought. They might have been able to pull it off if they had waited for the XR2 gen 2 to be ready, but then Apple would have launched first, and they didn't want that.
Hilariously the Quest 3 is already looking to be better than the Quest Pro, big ouf.
The confusing part is that it's looking like the Quest Pro has better controllers (tracked completely independently of the HMD), Quest Pro potentially has the better screens, but Quest 3 will have better GPU performance.
For a purely/predominantly Airlink player, could the QP still be the better option? An open question would be if the Q3's improved performance yields better Airlink/VD decode performance.