Meta reportedly canceled a near-term successor to Quest Pro, with the next model now “way out in the future”.
Quest Pro has received mixed at-best reviews, with criticism falling on its high price, underwhelming resolution, hefty weight, outdated processor, and lack of automatic room sensing for headline mixed reality features.
The Verge’s Alex Heath reports Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth told staff a planned second generation of Quest Pro is canned. Instead, Meta’s VP of VR Mark Rabkin reportedly told staff the company plans an advanced headset “way out in the future” featuring Codec Avatars, the company’s long-running research project to achieve photoreal spatial telepresence via face tracking sensors on VR headsets.
The Codec Avatars project was first revealed in 2019. Last year it’s lead Yaser Sheikh said that when the project started it was “ten miracles away”, and he now believed it was “five miracles away”.
“We want to make it higher resolution for work use and really nail work, text and things like that,” Rabkin reportedly said of the “way out” headset.
In November, a South Korean news outlet reported Meta executives met with Samsung and LG’s display divisions about supplying OLED and MicroLED microdisplays for future VR and AR devices. Microdisplays have significantly higher pixel densities and thus can enable higher resolution in headsets more compact than today’s.
Last year The Information reported the near-term Quest Pro successor had been slated for 2024, suggesting this “way out in the future” headset won’t arrive until 2025 at the absolute earliest.
UPDATE March 2: Heath confirmed the cancelation of the near-term Quest Pro successor in his weekly Command Line newsletter. This article has been updated to reflect this.
