The most impressive moment of my brief hands-on time with Quest Pro was the immediate disappointment of taking off the headset after using Horizon Workrooms.
I immediately and deeply missed the three sharp, large, virtual screens hovering in the sky over the physical Mac computer in front of me. Outside of VR, it was just a small Mac laptop with limited desktop space. Within VR, that Mac had a massive multi-monitor setup with room for more side-by-side windows than my desktop workstation at home.
When Workrooms debuted in August 2021 it was clearly at the forefront of Meta’s efforts to innovate. It was the company’s first app built from the ground up for hand tracking and, free from reliance on Touch controllers, the developers explored repurposing the controllers into writing implements. You can sketch ideas on your desk with the base of the controller, just like a pen. Quest Pro continues with this idea. The Touch Pro controllers that come with the headset (and sold separately for $300 for Quest 2 owners) include optional nibs that you can attach to the bottom for more credible use this way. I sketched ideas on little sticky notes in Workrooms in seconds and threw them on a virtual whiteboard.
I can’t help but be reminded of the first computer that was only mine – a iMac G3 from the late ’90s – and the endless number of sticky notes I’ve made on that machine over the years. Still, the notes app on iPhones is where people drop some of their most random and private thoughts. Until now, there’s been nothing quite like it in VR – at least not deeply bundled into the core experience of a headset. Sure, you can draw in the air with Tilt Brush, and while that experience was inspiring, it also ignored the conventions of hundreds of years of writing on flat surfaces. Workrooms brings that feeling to VR, and the Touch Pro controllers make it effortless.
VR headsets represent the future of personal computing, and that future has never been more clearly realized than the pairing of Workrooms with Quest Pro. They were made very clearly for each other. Quest 2 didn’t start adding multitasking until 2021 – laying the groundwork for VR to stand on its own as the next step in personal computing – and now the XR2+ chip in Quest Pro can make Meta go further. We are still expecting a generation leap is probably needed to really take things to the next level, but Quest Pro does indeed seem purpose-built to push things as far forward as Meta can take things now.
I should note that the frame rate in a YouTube video I played in one of the three virtual screens seemed to have a pretty poor frame rate, and a 1-2 hour battery life means people expecting real work on this thing still connected to external battery or wall power much of the time. Still, neither Meta’s software can be considered definitive, nor can my time with the system be enough to say anything definitive about how these impressions will pass the rating. You should come back with UploadVR in the coming weeks as we make those reviews.
For now, though, I’ll suggest that Workrooms combined with Quest Pro represents a more interesting and innovative future for Meta to focus on than what we’ve seen in Horizon Worlds so far.