The Meta quest Pro is dead. Or at least that is what has been reported by tech insider magazine the information. According to them meta let its suppliers know earlier this year that they will not be ordering new components for the quest pro. And consequentially manufacturer goertek will be left only building quest pro headsets with the remaining materials they have left. 

This means the quest pro will be discontinued and probably become a one off tech product you’ll see in a museum 30 years from now. To go along with this it is reported that meta also has stopped developing for the second gen quest pro. Meta wants to concentrate more on consumer headsets like the recently announced quest 3.

If I had to guess I would bet the meta pro didn’t sell very well at all, so they dropped the price from 1500 to a thousand in just 3 months on the market and that still probably didn’t create a good enough  demand for it and then Apple comes out with its pro higher end Vision Pro that melts the quest pro into a puddle of plastic. Which makes me believe knowing all of this Meta decided to move up their time table for the quest 3 announcement and quietly begin shunning the ole quest pro.  

Just looking at the numbers you see the quest 3 will have a higher resolution than the pro, the same pancake lenses as the pro, two rgb cameras instead of one and the depth sensor which we never saw come to fruition with the pro. 

The quest pro was a good experiment and definitely pushed vr forward in some ways but the quest 3 definitely has my eye for the future. Did you pick up a quest pro? Let me know in the comments and how do you feel knowing its discontinued?

This Oculus VR Headset Kills You

The VR OG and founder of Oculus turned weapon and defense contractor Palmer Luckey has created a murderous hardware mod for the meta quest pro. Luckey was Inspired by the fictional Nerve Gear headset found in the Japanese Novel slash Anime Sword Art Online in which characters are playing a real life online role playing game where if they die in the virtual game they die in real life. Lucky shared his prototype creation on his blog stating “The idea of tying your real life to your virtual avatar has always fascinated me – you instantly raise the stakes to the maximum level and force people to fundamentally rethink how they interact with the virtual world and the players inside it.  Pumped up graphics might make a game look more real, but only the threat of serious consequences can make a game feel real to you and every other person in the game. Tusche Palmer Tusche

So how exactly does this Quest pro mod kill you? Well Palmer attached 3 explosive charge modules which are connected to a photo sensor that detects when a specific game over type screen flashes red at a certain frequency and then they explode. With those simple parameters developers can integrate the death mod quite easily and so as palmer put it, When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user.

Palmer did say he has plans to more properly lockdown the system with an anti tamper mechanism which will make it impossible to remove or destroy the modded headset. 

Palmer ended his blog by saying there are a huge variety of failures that could occur with the mod and kill the user at the wrong time.  This is why I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself, and also why I am convinced that, like in sword art online, the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct. So Zuckerberg? Maybe John Carmack…

At this point states, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design.  It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user.  And It won’t be the last.

See you in the metaverse.

Are you ready to put your life on the line in the metaverse? Let me know down below and also this is a total joke… I’m pretty sure…. yeah?

A new week a new leak for the quest 2 pro. This time we get a view from inside the headset and its color pass through and mixed reality capabilities. Virtual office creator immersed shared the video showing off, what to me definitely looks like a quest pro creating a virtual conference room from a smaller table in someone’s home complete with other avatars joining the conference.  Immersed also give us a glimpse out of a virtual office set up with multiple digital windows for productivity using color passthrough and implementing an actual keyboard just like we’ve seen on the quest 2 infinite office feature. Oh and a familiar video thumbnail down there in a discord window. Maybe they used my video to this in obs!? 

Slowing down the video and looking at this frame we do see something we haven’t before in the form of a thick sided facial cover pad to prevent light leakage into the headset. My guess is that we will see this come as an add on accessory and from third party dealers. As with any of this it all could be clever editing but to me its looking a lot like the quest pro which we will finally get the full details of next week so get subscribed and stay tuned for coverage of Meta connect 2022. Are any of you interested in pre-ordering or buying a quest 2 pro? Let me know in the comments below and as always thanks for watching I’ll catch you in the next quickie

Somebody left behind the upcoming Meta Quest Pro codenamed Project Cambria at a hotel so now we have an unboxing ahead of it's reveal at Meta Connect 2022

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Meta Connect 2022 has officially been announced for October 11th. Looking back at Facebook Connect 2021 here's a preview of what we expect to see at this year's Meta Connect including release dates for games like Bonelab, Among Us VR, Ghostbusters VR and more.

Meta announced the date for their next connect presentation this week and Looking back to lat year’s connect we can see a possible game plan for this year’s meta connect on October 11th.

First and foremost we will get a complete overview of project cambria or what is rumored to be named the meta quest pro. Zuck daddy announced on the Joe Rogan podcast that it will be unveiled at this years connect, and he just posted this obstructed image of him wearing the headset telling us to see him at connect 2022. You know what, maybe I will. I’m sure a large chunk of the presentation will be sharing the specs and new abilities of the meta quest pro along with new games and experiences that take advantage of those features. I expect we will get a pre-order announcement with a price, and with the recent price hike of the quest 2, that pro headset surely will be expensive.

We hopefully will get actual release dates on some of the most anticipated VR games of the year that were announced at the meta gaming showcase, like the walking dead saints and sinners chapter 2 retribution, among us vr which last month we got access to the beta version, sorry they nda’d the testers and the devs have said it is pretty much finished, then we also have NFL pro era which I would think should be out any day now since the season is upon us and for the love of all crablets I hope we get another trailer and a solid release date for bonelab. Bonelab’s creator Brandon Laatsch has been more active on twitter lately discussing some rather interesting pieces of the game and back in july tweeted that the game is finished but they are working on bugs. So I’m laying my bet down here and fully expecting a release date at connect. Oh by the way remember that GTA San Andreas VR  announcement from last years connect? Where the Zuck is that? And lastly Ghostbusters VR was the grand finale at the gaming showcase in april and Halloween is just a couple weeks post the connect event so that would just make sense for us to get a date for the co-op mystery ghost sucker upper..

Last year’s connect was all about the metaverse so I’m sure there will be even more virtual environments and graphics that make us slightly uncomfortable. This years connect will focus on the building of the metaverse and the future of augmented and virtual reality. We will hear from industry leaders on the latest technologies and how to use them to grow said metaverse. 

We should see more about those avatar and horizon graphical updates which Mark teased on his instagram after the meme-pocalypse of the horizon france and spain announcement. I also bet we may learn more about meta’s recently announced partnership with qualcomm and what they are working towards when it comes to future snapdragon chipsets and hardware. I’ll throw this hailmary out there. Maybe we get just a tiny teaser for a quest 3 like the project cambria announcement last year? You know, we can always dream.

Other than the metaverse and VR games we probably will hear about more privacy and security features that no one will believe, and just maybe they will give us an update on that crazy future concept headset mirror lake.   

What do you think we’ll see at meta’s connect 2022? Shoot your shot in the comments below and we will see which we get right and which we get wrong come october. Thanks for watching and as always I’ll catch you in the next quickie.

Recently meta put out two trailers for its vision of vr and the metaverse. The trailer showed off a concept design for a vr headset and an interesting concept for finger tracking. The headset shown in both trailers is of course much sleeker than the quest or what we’ve seen of the leaked project cambria headset. These concepts play out the future meta is looking to build but some internet things cropped up showing that the road for meta to get there might be rough.

On a news forum posted by the startup cultivator Y combinator current and former employees commented on Meta’s recent plans to push pause on commercial production of new ar glasses, portal and other hardware.

The user which is cracking me up 

deadassfifr posted, I am a software engineer working at FB on Quest 2 etc. I go back and forth on this stuff in my head, but at this point I get the sense that it's basically a disaster. The incentives and management strategy at FB is not congruent to solving very difficult mobile hardware/software problems that they actually have.

The Quest 2 doesn't have the horsepower to drive a good experience and it still runs out of battery super fast. I think upper management expects this issue to be solved by incremental hardware improvements, but the fact is that mobile phones are pushing up against the same moore's law limits that are hitting the rest of the industry. They could maybe extract 1 order of magnitude better performance out of the package if they put together a great hardware team instead of licensing some crap out from Qualcomm. I think this is basically what Apple is doing, but I don't see it happening at FB.

The incentives at FB are more suitable for corporate climbers and constant schizophrenic over-sharing of ideas. You are never free from the next review cycle, and it has points baked in to basically evaluate your people skills. This seems fine at first, but the end result is that every single person ends up vying for a little piece of every one else's time, in order to demonstrate some "impact" in that sense. Every day is another hour of meetings with 20 different people. It's driving me crazy, and I think it will do the same thing to any passionate low-level engineer (either hardware or software).

Everybody has to be a leader, very little real work is getting done.

There is also some kind of incentive to generate more features and crap for e.g. horizons. I understand they're trying to throw a bunch of things at the wall to find what sticks, but the content teams don't seem to understand the efficiency constraints, and with so many silly features it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

John Carmack is very vocal pointing at various actual problems that need to be solved, but at this point browsing his feed is starting to feel kind of sad and hopeless. The incentives will always create messes faster than they can be cleaned up. The software will get slower while it needs to be faster. The hardware won't provide significant compute upgrades we desperately need. I guess we'll wait for 1-2 more reorgs until they move away from the failing VR push.

I think we would be seeing a very different outcome right now if Oculus hadn't been bought by FB, but that ship has sailed. Most of the Oculus people either quit or were fired when they decided to kill desktop VR in favor of mobile (a decision that is now being re-evaluated). It's just one bad decision after another.

Sorry for such a negative post. Maybe I should try some of those mindfulness classes so I can calm down.

A possible former employee responded that they quit after learning the work culture was more driven on execution rather than innovation stating a core critique of reality labs culture is that it doesn't produce anything new, but copies from others with ruthless execution.

Again this could be unsubstantiated and from people who are playing  pretend on the internet but I found it quite interesting and the way they described things felt like they knew the inside pretty well. What are your thoughts on all of this? Let me know down below and I’ll catch you in the next quickie