Meta has discounted its professional Meta Quest Pro headset for a limited time of $400, bringing the cost down up to $1,099 in the US. The agreement that according to CNET, running for one week in the US and two weeks in the UK at a price of £1,299, at least temporarily mitigates a major criticism of the high-end headset.
The Quest Pro offers a few key features that Meta’s $399 Quest 2 doesn’t. It supports full-color pass-through mixed reality with front-facing cameras, and it comes with new self-tracking controllers that are more compact, plus eye and facial feature tracking. The trade-off is a heavier design that we had some notable issues with. For anyone specifically interested in those options, the price reduction makes it a more attractive choice. Perhaps not coincidentally, the retail price matches HTC’s new Vive XR Elite, which packs similar features to the Quest Pro and ships later this month.
Meta has pinned its hopes on “metaverse” virtual and augmented reality services as its older social network Facebook struggles to attract new users, but the technology continues to emerge as competition intensifies. In addition to Meta and HTC, Apple is allowed also are finally close to announcing a long rumored passthrough mixed reality device. This week’s sales would allow Meta to pre-emptively bolster its presence in a market that’s still quite small — without committing permanently to selling hardware at a big loss.