Meta will release its Quest 2 Active Pack on Oct. 25 in what will be the company’s first fitness accessory bundle targeted to those who use Meta’s virtual reality headsets to exercise and play sports games. The Active Pack will cost $70 and contains safety accessories such as wrist straps and adjustable knuckle straps, as well as a wipeable foam interface worn under the Quest headset so that users can remove sweat from the device after working out.
Rob Shaw, Meta’s director of sports partnerships, first hinted at counter-sweat features coming to Meta’s headset in April when he spoke at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry conference. “The next iteration that we’re going to have of our current Quest 2 product is to make the headset more sweat proof, to have the controllers have better grips,” Shaw said. Meta also announced this week that Gym Class, a VR basketball game, will soon debut on its Quest 2 headset. Users can pay $14.99 to play privately on virtual courts with their friends or access the game’s free version to play on public virtual courts
Meta is also set to start selling its new Quest Pro headset on Oct. 25 for $1,500, a significant price jump compared to Meta’s existing $400 Quest 2 headset. The Quest Pro is being geared toward businesses who want to work in virtual reality, or in what Meta refers to as the Metaverse. The new headset contains eye and facial-tracking sensors for those movements to translate to a user’s virtual avatar. Meta also announced it has partnered with Microsoft to bring Microsoft Teams, Windows 365 and Xbox gaming into Meta’s headsets.
Meta’s collaboration with Microsoft and new VR headset come as Apple is expected to launch a mixed reality headset by early next year. Other new headsets from Sony PlayStation and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, add further competition to the hardware market for the metaverse.
“Soon you will have almost full body positional data from the headsets. Right now you can infer full body, we get [data] from the headset itself and hand movements from the controllers through things like inverse kinematics,” Sam Cole, CEO of VR fitness app FitXR told SportTechie last month. “Those AI systems are getting better and better every day. But also new headsets are bringing out additional tracking by cameras that will start to also make fuller arm tracking possible, lower torso tracking possible."
