A Meta Quest Pro User’s Perspective on Apple’s Vision Pro

The complete WWDC Apple Vision Pro review from the perspective of a daily Meta Quest Pro user. 

By now, most media outlets have shared their reviews of the Apple Vision Pro demo from WWDC. It made me wonder whether I should even throw my hat into the mix after all the reviews covered the positive, the negative, and the various opinions regarding whether it should even exist. However, what I did find lacking were reviews from the perspectives of actual VR users today and what that additional increase in price meant compared to their current setup. 

Thus here we go, the complete WWDC Apple Vision Pro review from the perspective of a daily Meta Quest Pro user. 

Like most tech enthusiasts, the 5th of June was the payoff of a decade-long build-up. The Apple rumored XR device had been just around the corner for the entire existence of the modern VR industry. Since their initial acquisition of Montreal Based pass-through mixed reality company Vrvana, the industry had been speculating on when they would enter the race. After almost ten years, we are finally here. 

Before we jump into the Vision Pro, let’s address the elephant in the room.👀 

The Meta Quest Pro had largely been seen as a flop in the industry, while it painted a similar future as Apple’s Vision Pro with familiar apps jumping out at you in augmented reality, an infinite monitor to replace the need for multiple monitors, it lacked the execution to live up to that vision. The Meta Quest Pro was rushed to market awkwardly at the end of 2022 with hardware and chips that were on the verge of being deprecated. Mostly viewed as a PR diversion, the $1,500 new flagship soon fizzled out of public interest. 

So what exactly went wrong?

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Meta

The Meta Quest Pro wasn’t exactly a bad product. Its upgraded XR2 Plus Chipset with 12Gb of RAM, paired with dedicated Snapdragon 662s per Touch Controller, meant that it was a massive upgrade from the Quest 2. However, the problem lies in its positioning. While the Quest 2 was correctly placed as a mobile gaming system akin to the Nintendo Switch, the Quest Pro, instead, ambitiously marketed itself to be a revolutionary productivity tool powered by Mixed Reality. 

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Meta

While the High-Res sensors on the inside provided some interesting gimmicks like facial tracking and eye-tracking, the pass-through experience was grainy and distorted. This resulted in the entire marketing campaign being rendered disingenuous; after all, this was still just a VR headset. In the end, the Meta Quest Pro left gamers feeling alienated while sewing further distrust in the general public. 

Actually Using the Meta Quest Pro

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Lowyat

All things considered, execution aside, the Quest Pro still has a lot to offer as a VR device. Aside from Sim racing and Flight Simulators, which I use my trusted HP Reverb G2 for, the Quest Pro has become my day-to-day VR workhorse. The Touch Pro controllers, with their dedicated chips, meant that FPS games became a lot more versatile.

Gone were the days when reloading or drawing a rifle slung behind your back meant risking the loss of tracking and potential gory death. With the resolution bump and reduced screen door effect, eye stamina skyrocketed for apps like Immersed, where I can comfortably set up five additional virtual monitors to remote work with other VR-obsessed engineers for hours. 

So what does an additional $2000 get you?

Photo by Justin Sullivan / Getty Images 

While the Apple demo was limited and leaves much more to be desired, there are a few things we can infer from just looking at the hardware alone. To begin with, the build of the headset is much sturdier and higher quality than any Meta device. While this is fitting for a luxury brand like Apple, the downside is the weight.

Plastic may feel cheap to the touch, but they are incredibly lightweight and make for better comfort when used for a longer duration. Apple mitigates this with a separate battery pack connected via a charging cord. While this may be a dealbreaker for many, the ergonomic design of the device renders the cord both out of sight and out of touch. 

Putting the headset on, the first thing you realize is how crisp the displays are. With 23 million pixels across each 1.41-inch micro-OLED display, the Vision Pro delivers a stunning 4k per-eye resolution. With a passthrough experience barely distinguishable to retina vision, the VisionOS app icons truly felt as if they flew right out of an Apple watch and were really floating in the air in front of you. 

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Apple

While I’ve gone through my share of eye-tracking calibrations and hand-tracking demos from the Waterloo-founded Myo Armband to the infamous Magic Leap 1, it wasn’t until the Vision Pro I was convinced that one day I might actually use these input types as a regular method of interacting with my computing device. 

The Meta Quest Pro also had both these functions; however, the blindspots, due to lack of camera coverage, made it terribly cumbersome to use. Using your hands to move a 2D cursor across the 3D plane is awkward and exhausting, not to mention the pinch-based gesture for content selection had to be deliberate and precise, with false positives and negatives registering more times than I can count.

Thus after the novelty wore off, I switched back to using the Touch controllers and never looked back. The Apple Vision Pro, blessed with 12 optical sensors, was incredibly accurate and sensitive. This meant my desired inputs were registering correctly while my hands were simply resting by my side or in my lap. 

The eye-tracking-powered gaze-based selection process was also intuitive and easy to adapt to. These quality-of-life improvements to the general head-mounted display experience may seem trivial, but the little attention to detail is precisely what Apple is known for. When using the device for long periods of time, these little things would likely make or break the decision to adopt MR or not. 

The Vision Pro demo on productivity was limited to projecting a Macbook into MR and giving you the ability to resize it to any dimension you would please. This is similar to the various apps you can use in Quest Pro today. Whether it’s an infinite office or Immersed, screencasting is not a novel technology. What is impressive is the lack of latency made possible by the new R1 chip and the seamless transition from VR to AR.

A quick spin dial allows you to bring your whole workspace into a Virtual environment while reversing the process brings you right back into reality. While the demo didn’t showcase multiple screens or customized virtual scenes, one can only expect all of that to be available to you within the SDK and at launch.

One thing to note is that the Vision Pro is powered by its own operating system, which means aside from casting your Macbook into MR, you can access your workspace even without your computer being present. This makes the Vision Pro a computing device on its own and is exactly the reason that warrants the additional $2000 in its price tag. 

In the end, the Apple Vision Pro might not be a dream VR gaming console, but its presence in the industry will drive thousands of iOS developers to the world of MR. In turn, knowing Apple, a Vision SE is probably already on the roadmap, ready to launch to the general public when enough content has flooded the VisionOS Store. I believe Apple Vision Pro is the beginning, but also the final straw that convinces companies everywhere to continue investing in the Metaverse.