Mark Zuckerberg’s best known for Facebook, but the Meta Quest Pro is now a priority for the CEO. Having outlined his ambitions to create a $100b metaverse business, he’s slowly hyping up the social media giant’s Oculus Quest 2 successor. Officially known as Project Cambria, a new tech demo provides a fresh look at how it handles Mixed Reality (MR) gaming and its visual capabilities.
The Meta Quest Pro MR tech combines VR capabilities with Augmented Reality (AR), placing virtual objects into real-life environments. This lets you see the physical world around you while playing, making Project Cambria significantly different to other best VR headset contenders. In this case, Zuckerberg demonstrates an MR fencing game on the head, and it looks pretty impressive.
In a short 51-second clip to Facebook, later shared by VR Trailers & Clips, Zuckerberg is joined by Olympic gold medalist Lee Kiefer and 2x Olympic medalist Gerek Meinhardt. Going for a few rounds, Mark works up a sweat, and you can hear Kiefer praise the demo as “really accurate.” Unfortunately, the teaser doesn’t provide any direct shots of the upcoming VR headset, as Cambria’s is effectively blurred out.
Facebook heavily compresses uploaded videos, so the clip doesn’t provide a great look at Cambria’s graphical capabilities. However, the tech demo clearly demonstrates the headset’s colour passthrough abilities – a stark contrast to Oculus Quest 2’s black and white passthrough.
If you’re hoping for more traditional VR experiences, fear not. While Meta says Cambria is a “prosumer / industrial-grade mixed reality” device – one that could cost three Oculus Quest 2 headsets – it’s also compatible with Oculus Quest and Quest 2 releases. That likely applies to the rumoured Oculus Quest 3 too. So, even with this change in technology, you can still transfer over your previous favourite games.