Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg holding a Quest Pro VR headset. PhotoL Courtesy of Meta

A year after rebranding itself as Meta, Facebook's parent company on Tuesday released a new VR headset that it hopes will show concrete results from its already-massive investments.

Why it matters: The company admits that its effort to build an immersive, 3-D virtual network for work and play will take years to unfold. But it has to begin selling people on the value and the excitement of that long road today if it's ever going to reach its destination or persuade the rest of us to follow.

Driving the news: Meta's new product is the $1,500 Quest Pro headset, which offers a slimmer design along with better optics and new sensors that allow the device to capture facial gestures as well as mix virtual and real-world objects. (See below for more on the Quest Pro.)

The big picture: The Quest Pro announcement comes as Meta faces significant financial and regulatory pressures.

Between the lines: During the briefing with reporters, Zuckerberg spent as much time talking about a prototype neural-input device on his wrist as he did talking up the new VR headset.

Zuckerberg kept pushing the conversation toward the bulky device on his arm, which people might ultimately use to control a cursor or even type.

I had to change the subject to even ask a question about a broader topic: What, I asked, are you doing to ensure that the problems of today's internet don't carry over into — or, worse, get amplified by — the metaverse?

My thought bubble: The more time and money Meta spends now working on its metaverse future, the less time it's likely to be able to devote to fixing the real-world problems of its existing social networks. That will be extra true as Meta and other tech companies get more cost-conscious.

The company's metaverse pivot, some observers argue, resembles the moment a decade ago when Facebook shifted all its energy to the mobile market. But the move also resembles Facebook's still-unfulfilled promise to provide users of all its services with encrypted private messaging.

Go deeper: Facebook's long, bumpy road to the metaverse