Meta Quest Pro Review: the meaning of “incomplete”

And it’s pretty easy to see why: when the Quest Pro launched, it had a ton of rare features such as high-res pancake lenses, immaculate eye-tracking and even AR capabiltiies, but since then those have become more widely available on cheaper headsets too.

But the real bummer starts bumming when you realize that there’s not much to do with these fun features on the Quest Pro to begin with.

Design and Build Quality

Keyword: premium. There’s plastic, but it feels rigid and the glass finish and overkill amount of cameras screams “pricey”. But when you pick up the Quest Pro and you put it on, you become confident that it is a sturdy piece of equipment for sure.

Unlike on the software side, the physical part is almost perfect. When you go to put the headset on, it elongates slightly in order to let you get a way more natural fit, which you can then further enhance through this nifty knob on the back of the headset.

The cushions where you’re supposed to plant your face and neck are made out of this material, which feels like something between rubber and faux leather. No joke, this thing feels so soft that I accidentally tightened my headset a bit too much a few times, when I didn’t really have to: the material is also really grippy, without feeling like it’s trying to tear your skin away.

Also, I sweated way less with the Quest Pro. I’m not sure if it’s due to the material alone, or also because the headset is more open on its frontside. Now, I personally liked that last bit, but it does let some light in, so if you’d like to not have that, Meta can hook you up with another accessory through its online store.

The point I’m trying to make here is that the Quest Pro is really comfortable. Even after wearing it for hours, I didn’t feel any sort of neck strain, regardless of whether I was sitting or standing. The weight balance felt perfect for me.



Alas, there is always a “but” coming, so next up: the buts of the Quest Pro’s design.

• The power button is too small and similar to the volume buttons
• The buttons are way too easy to push unintentionally
• You need to physically stick your fingers inside the headset while you are wearing it to adjust IPD (interpupillary distance)
• The automatic IPD adjustment simply tells you what to do, instead of doing it

The headset was really easy to wake up by accident, overall. If one of my cats would land on my desk or if I would gently bump the charging dock unintentionally with my coffee mug while writing, the thing would just come alive and start making distant chirping noises.

Oh, and yes: it does have an accelerometer built-in, which could’ve been used to detect if there was any sort of motion, specifically of the type that one would execute when trying to equip themselves with any sort of headgear, but oh well.

Well, at least you can turn this nifty knob to move the lenses around, so you could wear your glasses while wearing the headset on too. Neat!

Picture quality and IPD adjustment

The pancake lenses that the Quest Pro comes with used to be a real selling point for the headset, but now that the Quest 3 is going to have them too for way cheaper, it stopped feeling as special.

Regardless, if you haven’t tried anything of their quality up to this point, you will notice a difference in sharpness and the wider FOV right away. Now, how impactful that difference remains after you’ve become fully immersed into your workflow or some sort of game: you be the judge of that.

The Quest Pro supports an IPD range from 59 all the way to 71, which was pretty wide for when it launched. Now, it’s no longer that impressive, but what did impress me is that I didn’t feel almost any difference between the minimum and maximum setting.

And no, I’m not cross-eyed. Yet.

But that may just have been due to the Quest Pro’s impeccable eye-tracking capabilities which you can’t do anything with. Sure, it does this impressive thing where it renders whatever you are looking at better, so it always feels in focus and sharp, but that’s not something that users can utilize.

I mean, PlayStation VR let’s users use its eye-tracking feature for UI navigation. Why isn’t the Quest Pro doing that? A mystery for the ages, I guess.

The one feature that I was looking forward to most, however, was higher-quality passthrough, which in my mind should’ve translated to proper AR features. And I’m all about those!

What I’m not about is everything being a fuzzy blur, or the impossibility of making out anything beyond big objects, or reaching out for my water bottle feeling like the risk of a lifetime, or the live feed constantly wiggling like I’m lying belly-first on asphalt during a hot summer day.

Now, sure. It’s better than the Quest 2 and in color. But, honestly, big whoop. It still looks like a fever dream from some sort of Picasso painting, which personally had me feeling physically worn out after testing.

Which I’d be totally fine with, by the way, as long as I could get some proper AR action going on, but thanks to the lack of native spatial awareness on the Quest Pro, I couldn’t really do that.

Not unless I wanted to cough up for some costly third-party productivity tools, which would allow me to do the things that I expected the Pro-grade headset to be able to do by default.

What is there by default, though, is tons and tons of God rays. These are visual distortions that can appear around the edges of the lenses when you’re looking at bright stuff. And, yeah: they are there and at times, painfully obvious.

Lastly, a bit of good news for everyone: the displays are painfully bright. Now, I did get annoyed by the lack of an easy way to lower said brightness, because it really is blinding at times, but I definitely appreciated the stark blacks.

Performance

All rendered content on the Quest Pro looks great! It’s sharp and that specific blur that typically becomes really obvious when viewing VR content on a flat screen is almost non-existent when you put the headset on.

In short: becoming immersed is as easy as one, two, I’m there.

All of the apps and games, and VR videos I tried ran flawlessly and I didn’t encounter any sort of performance issues while running content in the Quest Pro’s standalone mode. Now, the ones that utilized imperfect features like eye-tracking or hand tracking did disappoint a bit, but that isn’t related to raw performance anyway.

Speaking of those, I can say that hand tracking feels jittery. You need to hold your hands above a certain level for it to work properly to begin with, which forces you into some odd positions that are anything but comfortable.

And, if you aren’t in any of them you just get to not have hands, so have fun with that.

Passthrough mode is pretty staggering for another reason too: the drastic difference in quality between rendered objects and the live feed is capable of giving you a headache, absolutely free of charge.

By the way, there’s also this simple formula too:

Passthrough mode - spatial computation = a layer of rendered, flat UI in a VR environment, on top of a blurry live feed.

And if that sounds like fun to you, I’d love to have you over for a party!

And, by the way, depending on whether passthrough and eye-tracking is enabled and what apps you are running in the background, the Quest Pro can get really pretentious about the boundaries you need to be inside, which I found to be adorable.

Like, when I have the video player closed, I can walk around my house all I want, but if I open it up? Oooh, I better get running to that foundry, because I won’t be watching anything otherwise!

Well, at least the rushing was worth it, because the speakers on this thing are great. I wouldn’t use them to enjoy pretentious music or anything, but beyond that they did a superb job of making me feel like I had headphones on. In a good way!

Here’s another funny bit: the Quest Pro has a dedicated category in the Meta Quest store and it’s just as barren as you can imagine. Not only that, but the demos and free apps available, which can actually show off the capabilities of the headset are basically non-existent yet.

So you could say that it comes with a built-in adoption rate indicator! Sweet!

By the way, I’ve got to mention how the UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) of the Quest Pro is, because it’s absolutely baffling.

So, you know how Android basically nailed the concept of a quick access menu and that’s been around for about a decade now? Well, Meta hasn’t gotten the memo, even despite the fact that the Quest Pro is running on the same ‘Droid-based OS like the Quest 2.

Here’s a familiar concept: if an icon is grayed out, that toggle is turned off.

Here’s Meta’s interpretation of that: if an icon is grayed out, the toggle is turned off, unless we’re talking about eye-tracking, which is gray by default and then turns red when it’s off, but other toggles are blue when they are on, but then don’t become red when they are off, but gray instead.

I can give more examples, but I’d probably create a tongue-twister in the process, so I’ll stop.

UX needs a bit of work too. For example, most of the phones on the market can realize that you meant to tap “Back” if you were, say, 12% off target and will as such, they just do you a solid and send you a menu back.

Now, let’s see if you can think of a device from the Quest line of products with the word “Pro” in its title, which doesn’t have such features. Did you guess the one? Let me know in the comments!

PC VR Capabilities

Picture this: you just got a brand new PC VR game and the Quest Pro unit you got for a bargain just arrived. You can’t wait to play it! So you set it up, connect it to your PC with the included cable and then bash your head in for about 3 hours until you realize that the included cable is for charging only.

If you want to use the Quest Pro as a PC VR headset, though, you must use USB-C, as no other interface is available. As such, you have two options:

• Buy a cable from Meta’s store
• Spend hours scouring the internet for one that is suitable in terms of durability, length and capability

But hey, at least the Quest Pro doesn’t insist for the cable to be USB-C to USB-C, so you can get one ending in USB-A or an adapter instead.

But whatever you do, just don’t rely on Air Link without setting up a dedicated network for it. From my experience, I can just say that I’m really happy that I’ve tried it during October, because now I have the perfect story for 2023’s Halloween season.

Essentially, this feature allows you to link the Quest Pro with your PC through the Oculus app for Windows completely wirelessly. And that’s awesome! But there’s this thing that people say about things that are too good to be true.

And yeah, it basically doesn’t work.

Important context: I have an insanely high WiFi speed of 1GBps at home, combined with a router that can support it over two networks. Air Link happens over WiFi and is reliant on its speed and quality, so this thing should’ve just loved my setup.

Instead, the experience went something like this:

• Pairing took ages for no real reason, given the Pro’s specs
• There was no indication that I was waiting for the process to complete, so I kept checking if something had not crashed (foreshadowing! ooh!)
• The quality of the stream felt like I was watching YouTube in 360p
• I could navigate my PC’s operating system without any issues, so long as I didn’t make any sudden movements, lest I be confronted with the fact that the Quest Pro can’t render fast enough and as such, I’d be sent to what appeared to be the literal end of some sort of Minecraft world floating in the darkness of the abyss

So, with this being me and all, eventually I did find a setting that allowed me to set a fixed bitrate option, which showed me that the Quest Pro couldn’t really handle high-speed connection anyways, which made Air Link pointless as a concept to me, but oh well.

Still, I was dedicated to trying this out, but I need you to trust me when I say that it turned out to be an impossible task.

Suddenly, I found myself in a deadly game of “The more you touch this slider, the more the Quest Pro stutters and starts to overheat!”. And when I say “deadly”, I mean that after a few attempts everything started lagging so much that the Quest Pro and my PC collectively crashed.

And what’s spookiest about this, Scoob, is that the Quest Pro and my PC weren’t even linked at the time!

My PC recovered and I had to take care of a few corrupted files and by that I don’t just mean my drafts for this review. The Quest Pro restarted normally and then completely refused to establish a connection with my PC again.

Speaking of which, isn’t it about time to get SteamVR supported natively on the Quest ecosystem anyway? I don’t know who the gatekeeper in that relationship is, but it sounds like something that should be a thing, right?

The fact that Meta didn’t include a cable to link up то my PC with made me feel like it expects me to repurchase titles — which I already own elsewhere, like Steam — on the Quest platform again. And if I didn’t like that, I could go for the alternative: buy a new, costly cable.

Controllers

The Quest Pro’s controllers are some of the smartest and most advanced VR controllers on the market. They literally have dedicated SoCs inside each one, and it's the type of silicone that could basically run a smartphone.

The result? They are too clever. In fact, they are so good at detecting motion, that at times navigation was difficult because of the small hand jitters they would pick up. But this is an issue with a clear software solution that is up to Meta.

Speaking of, there was also the issue of the gesture controls that Meta has implemented. For example, tapping the two controllers together is what enables hand-tracking. Now, kindly introduce the concept of Beat Saber and your mind and try to guess how my getting a new high score went.



Then there’s the issue of this impossible wall, which the controllers didn’t like going beyond. If I would reach too far out or something, the controllers would suddenly just lose connection without any reason. I still have no clue what that was all about.

Both of these bad boys have built-in, rechargeable batteries and I can confirm that they are batteries that recharge. If you put them on the dock, they charge more slowly, so Meta gave you a cable in the box that allows you to charge them more swiftly.

With the one caveat that the cable allows you to charge only one controller at a time. Now, can you guess what type of cable Meta also sells on its online store? You’re getting really good at this guessing business, great job!

Battery life

The Quest Pro, on a full charge, is said to last you anywhere from two to about four hours and from the time I spent with the headset, I can confirm that the statement is basically true.

In fact, from my testing, I was always either done with testing the headset or tired of eye-strain by the time I wanted to take it off, and then it always had at least 30% more juice in it, and the controllers were somewhere in that range too.

Same as with the controllers: you can plug in the headset directly with the charger and it will get its fill more quickly. But if you go for the combined effort and use the included dock, you’ll have about three hours of enjoying real life before you can use the Quest Pro again.

Also, a bit of advice: when putting the headset and the controllers on the dock, make sure that their LED indicators light up. Just saying. It's not like I left them there overnight, but positioned in the wrong way and then spent an hour wondering what went wrong or anything.

Value for Money

So the Quest Pro’s visuals look great and it sounds awesome, and it’s also really comfortable when you put it on. Sure, the features that it offers are flawed here and there, but primarily in ways that you’d likely not care about anyway.

Still, it’s probably the worst value-for-money XR headset that you can get… As a consumer.

Allegedly and supposedly, and probably and even maybe: the real value of the Quest Pro lies in what devs can do with it. And if they do something, it’s more likely to be aimed at enterprise users, instead of a-VR-eage Joes and typical Resident Evil VR enthusiasts.

Unless you are dead-set on getting a Quest Pro specifically — for whatever reason you’ve decided on, bless you — then you are likely to get just as much as a kick out of using a Quest 2 and if you don’t mind spending an extra $100 or so, then getting the latest Quest 3 instead.

Why? Well, because when I compare the Quest Pro to other headsets of the same price range, like the Pimax Crystal, two things become apparent:

• The Quest Pro comes in an incomplete package
• The Quest Pro doesn’t come with enough natively-supported features

Meanwhile, the Quest 3 has better controllers, the same lenses as the Quest Pro, a more powerful chip in it and it supports not only high-quality and colored passthrough, but is also confirmed to get native spatial capabilities next year.

Oh, and it costs $500 instead of $1,500.

Verdict

Have you ever spent time with a tech product with which you were having such a bad experience, that you felt like you were doing something wrong? Well, the Quest Pro basically put a dunce cap on me and made me sit in the corner for no real reason.

I get why it seems interesting, trust me: those specs just don’t lie. But I don’t get Meta’s approach to the product’s presentation, feature set or native capabilities. The price tag simply doesn’t meet the expectations that it sets out. 

And now, for the most important part of the review, because I’m sure that at least one of you will bring this up: yes, the Quest Pro smells.

It doesn’t only smell of “new tech”, it smells of tech-heat, like the Steam Deck does when it’s handling an intense game. And that is testament to the engineering prowess that Meta undoubtedly wanted to pour into the Quest Pro.

And it’s such a shame that most of us will never get a taste of what the Quest Pro feels like when pushed to its limits.