full image - Repost: Quest Pro Review (Productivity) (from Reddit.com, Quest Pro Review (Productivity))
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When Quest Pro was announced, I saw a lot of myself in the target audience for this device. I was about to get on a plane for a month long business trip, and I envisioned being able to strap this thing to my head and get work done on large monitors wherever I happened to be and play PC games in the evenings on a large virtual screen. The ability to step out of wherever I was and put myself into a work space was very appealing. I looked at Immersed and Workspaces and thought this is exactly the kind of thing that I was looking for.Getting the hardware, I was initially very impressed. It was way more comfortable, the visual clarity felt a lot better, I could wear my glasses, and the IPD variability made using the device so much more comfortable with less eye strain. I actually liked the open sides, as I didn't feel like I was completely disconnected from my surroundings. Battery life was unfortunate, but not a deal breaker, as my head canon included a cable connection to my laptop to drive the screens. The "AR" claims, though. Wow. They really shined up that turd, it is not useable. It's roughly the same as the black and white version, just color. Their advertising on this feature was as false as the legs they had. I encountered lots of bugs, but those don't worry me, as I'm certain those will get ironed out.My feelings about the hardware soured immediately when I actually tried to do some work. The only productivity focused app seemed to be the browser. Everything else required me to have my laptop out, which bothered me more as I went along. This thing is for productivity, but it can't do any of that natively, even the most basic things. I'm not sure what I expected, but not finding the advertised Office 365 suite or any kind of similar thing was really confusing. Ok, so I'd need to use my laptop. No problem.So I bought the $80 link cable, because I wanted to, you know, link to my laptop so that I could use the screens and play games. I was very confused to find out that doing this throws the quest into a weird parallel "Rift" universe where hand gestures don't work. I couldn't get Immersed or Workspace to connect correctly this way. Cursory googling informed me that this is counterintuitively not how this works.Okay. So I tried wifi. I booted up my game, connected my laptop and my quest to the hotel wifi and found a pretty clear screen. But the visual lag was about half a second, which was unplayable. Immersed wouldn't even connect, which is probably due to a helpful firewall to prevent users exploiting each others computers. I started looking into the direct wifi connection through immersed. Simple enough. Start up a hotspot on my laptop, connect the quest to that, configure sharing to allow that hotspot to use my hotel wifi connection. The headset communications should be local, which should be super fast. Nope. My wifi card seemed unable to do both at the same time, and I have a year old Asus gaming laptop. I was able do work like this without internet, but the kludge was stronger than my desire to continue trying to make this work.More cursory googling revealed that I would have to get another network card, or better, a wifi 6 access point, which I could then join both my laptop and my quest to. That's about where my fucks all ran out, and returning the headset for that $1500 was worth more to me than keeping it.Lastly, I think they're doing all of this wrong. Every single app seems to be a self contained room that I can't configure except for the primary focus of the app (i.e. the workstation), with a bare bones set of functions. This feels fundamentally wrong to me. I feel like Meta should be building a kind of substrate environment, and that most apps should be objects that I spawn into that environment, or they should be experiences/worlds built of that substrate that I travel to. So I should be able to wander around in Horizons and get an email notification, spawn Workspace to drop my desk into the world and allow me to do a little work, then dismiss it and resume whatever I was doing. Or I should be able to spawn just outlook as an object within the world I'm in, quickly scroll through, see that it's spam, and dismiss it.As a gaming system, I do feel that the quest pro is an objective improvement in most respects. I feel like my use case isn't uncommon. I already have a great home PC gaming setup, so I don't really see myself using this much at home for PC gaming, but it would have been a game changer to have on the road. Probably still could have been if I'd had just a few more fucks in my satchel.
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