Facebook has been teasing work on a pro version of its Oculus Quest headset for quite some time, and now a series of what appear to be setup videos for the unreleased product have leaked from its own servers.
The videos were first spotted on Reddit over the weekend and downloaded from Oculus.com by The Verge and embedded below. They show an unreleased, dark-colored headset being used to customize virtual avatars with what looks like full body tracking, new controllers with a charging dock, and more footage of the Horizon Workrooms app for work collaboration in VR.
Executives from Facebook have teased the possibility of a pro version of the Oculus Quest for a while, and on October 28th, the company is hosting its annual Connect conference where it usually debuts new VR products. Facebook has also been planning to rebrand its parent company name to focus more on building its vision of the metaverse, which could use the richer avatars depicted in these videos.
If Facebook does debut this headset at Connect this week, it would be a reverse from when Andrew Bosworth, VP at Facebook’s Reality Labs, said earlier this year that there wasn’t going to be a Quest Pro this year.
“We do have a lot of things in development where we want to introduce new functionality to the headset along the kinds that people theorize that we would want to introduce, and that’s a little ways off still,” he said in a Twitter Space conversation with Oculus consulting CTO John Carmack in April. “It’s still not gonna happen this year.”
So there’s a chance that this headset isn’t shown at Connect or that it’s called something else when it does debut, though a YouTuber who goes by Basti564 told me he found direct references in recent Oculus software to an “Oculus Pro.” He added on Twitter that, based on where these videos were discovered in the headset’s unreleased firmware, they will play on initial setup.
A spokesperson for Oculus declined to comment on the leaked videos below when I asked about them on Monday.
