It would seem that an early engineering sample of the upcoming Meta Quest Pro VR headset has been out in the wild for some time now, after a developer seemingly accidentally left the device at a hotel they had been staying at. This curious series of events took place just a month ahead of Meta's upcoming VR event that is slated for October 11, suggesting that Quest Pro may be the flagship product there.A high-end VR headset that targets professional users and high-grade gaming enthusiasts, this particular Meta Oculus Quest VR headset is supposed to represent the pinnacle of the company's advances in this niche. The aforementioned engineering sample of the Quest Pro was discovered by hotel employee Ramiro Cardenas, who quickly unboxed the device before the developer could retrieve it.According to Cardenas' unboxing video of the device, which was originally shared on Facebook and later uploaded to Reddit, Quest Pro comes with 256 GB of onboard storage by default, has three front-facing cameras, and generally looks the way it was depicted in the earliest leaked renders. Being an expensive high-end device with a niche audience, it remains to be seen if the launch of Meta Quest Pro affects Facebook's $3 billion loss on VR development, but the company is likely to leverage its R&D for years to come, making these losses potentially less problematic than they may seem at first.
After Quest Pro renders got leaked in 2021, there wasn't much in the way of news about Meta's upcoming flagship VR headset, short of it getting slated for an October 2022 release window. The fact that these headsets are now out and about and presumably being actively used and tested could certainly be interpreted as further confirmation of this announcement, underlining Meta's intent to carve out an enterprise-focused VR niche as quickly as possible.
Though Quest Pro is primarily aimed at professionals and enterprise users, all the games featured on Meta's April Quest showcase will still be playable on it. By the looks of it, it's going to compete in an entirely different category than Quest and Quest 2 do, and is bound to be more closely comparable to the likes of (now outdated) a fully kitted-out Valve Index VR platform.
Keeping that in mind, it's also worth pointing out that Meta's lower-end VR headsets aren't exactly cheap, either. In fact, it was earlier this year that Meta Quest 2 got a price hike that made the community very unhappy. The headset is now sitting at $499.99, and this change is likely going to be reflected in Quest Pro's starting MSRP as well. The specifics are likely to get announced during the October event, but it seems like a safe bet that it won't be affordable.