It's easy to feel down about the state of the world, what with that looming global recession, the pandemic, those people who insist they unironically love candy corn ... and so on.
All of that is enough to make anyone curious about this metaverse thing Mark Zuckerberg keeps touting as the future of the internet. This is the digital destination where Zuck expects us to spend more and more of our time — at work, but not really, or hanging out with avatar friends at not-real coffee shops.
He's so convinced of this future that last year he renamed Facebook, the company he founded, to Meta, and is plowing billions of dollars into building the hardware that will transport us there.
On Tuesday, Meta unveiled its latest effort in that mission, the Meta Quest Pro headset.
As my colleague Rachel Metz reports, this thing is slick, powerful, and much improved from earlier iterations. And still super impractical.
In short: It's a cool gadget in search of an audience.
Per Rachel:
It can display text and fine details in VR, making it possible to read even small type with ease. It can track your eyes and facial features, giving you a sense of connection with other people in virtual spaces: If you arch your eyebrows or they puff up their cheeks in real life, so too will the VR avatars. And it can be used as a mixed-reality headset, showing you a view of the world around you in color while letting you interact with digital objects — whether you're painting on an ersatz easel or putting on a faux mini-golf course.
But! Here's the deal: This thing costs $1,500 — nearly four times that of the company's cheapest Quest 2 headset. That might be OK for deep-pocketed professionals in design or architecture who could use the immersive tech for their businesses, or perhaps for the well-to-do VR faithful who are emotionally invested in the metaverse idea.
But for normies, that's a lot of dough. Too much, you might say, in an economy that's hobbled by high prices and potentially tumbling into a recession.
For that price, you could buy two Xbox Series X gaming consoles and still have money left over for brunch. You could buy a top-of-the-line iPhone and a flight to Denver. Heck, you could skip the gadgets, book a flight to Italy and sip some very real, delicious wine food for a few days all for the price of a single Quest Pro, which promises... I dunno, some nice graphics?
Time will tell: Customers can pre-order the headset starting today and it'll ship later this month.
BIG PICTURE
As Rachel notes, the Quest Pro may not be the Tickle Me Elmo of the 2022 holiday season (Gen Zers, you can ask your parents about that one). But its improved design is a milestone for Zuck and his Meta dream, which cost the company $2.8 billion in losses the second quarter alone.
The lenses are thinner, the headset itself less front-heavy than earlier iterations, and it reportedly does a better job blending the real and virtual spaces around the user. Which all sounds like a step in the right direction, if you're someone who believes the right direction is ultimately one in which our lives eventually revolve even more than they do now around being digitally connected to one another.
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