Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

oculus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 361 posts

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#311

Post by djohnston »

trixie_ wrote: post #7

It's a strange move given Facebook changed their name to promote VR and the Quest is their flagship device. Also surprised that after mass producing this device for almost 2 years their manufacturing and supply chain costs aren't dialed in enough to maintain the current price. The message here is that VR is 'failing'. I hope it's not, but that's the message with this backwards move.

> Also surprised that after mass producing this device for almost 2 years their manufacturing and supply chain costs aren't dialed in enough to maintain the current price.

Given the across-the-board inflation and supply chain havoc why would you expect this?

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#312

Post by CursedUrn »

weego wrote: post #236
onepremise wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to mention they can now Id you based off your retina scan. They can also profile your house and products you use in your house. Facebook is reckless with data. Just read up on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They were even sharing facebook messenger conversations with third party data consumers.

they can now Id you based off your retina scan There's enough wrong with FB/Meta to not need to go into conspiracies

I presume you're not aware of Facebook's research into eye tracking for VR. It goes a lot further than just identity. I believe their main interest is gauging emotional response for better targeted advertising.

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#313

Post by CursedUrn »

skyyler wrote: post #300
PaulsWallet wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a weirdly aggressive comment. I'm not saying you have to trust Facebook but there are much better ways to shake Oculus users down for money than risk getting caught watching people on the toilet through their VR cameras.

Why are you imagining petty voyeurism? I'm imagining more like "scan the room for products recently purchased at non-amazon retailers" or "identify how many worker-consumers are in the room and how engaged they are with The Product" Data, not video or pictures.

Petty voyeurism will happen (we've seen enough stories about this with Amazon Alexa) but I agree that's nowhere near the main problem with this kind of technology.

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#314

Post by CursedUrn »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #57
yonaguska wrote: post #3

As much as I wanted to get into VR, Meta taking over the Quest has thankfully saved me countless sunken dollars and hours.

VR wouldn’t even be a thing anymore without their efforts. PC Tower VR is a dead end where the complexity and hardware costs will never take it the customer base size that justifies developing non-indie content. I don’t think Valve would have even bothered building Index without the Oculus threat.

This is revisionist history. Facebook didn't contribute to the early days of modern VR, they just came in and bought it once someone else had done the hard work. The first VR headset that let you get up and move around with motion controls was the Vive, not even anything from Oculus.

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#315

Post by Karrot_Kream »

CursedUrn wrote: post #312
weego wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they can now Id you based off your retina scan There's enough wrong with FB/Meta to not need to go into conspiracies

I presume you're not aware of Facebook's research into eye tracking for VR. It goes a lot further than just identity. I believe their main interest is gauging emotional response for better targeted advertising.

If you look at the original FT article which covered the patents that caused the whole stir [1] (paywalled but I found it in the usual places) you'll see that their patents only cover using eye tracking to render media. A comment in FT's interview with Clegg discusses using eye tracking to see if an advertisement was looked at, like how JS is used to track whether an ad was viewed now. "Gauging emotional response" is really, really stretching it. Meta does enough garbage today, let's not foment conspiracy here.

[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/76d40aac-034e-4e0b-95eb-c5d34146f...

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#316

Post by devwastaken »

dmix wrote: post #183
yonaguska wrote: post #3

As much as I wanted to get into VR, Meta taking over the Quest has thankfully saved me countless sunken dollars and hours.

You're missing out, Quest 2 was one of the best purchases I've made in the last year. I also don't think VR is good enough to be worth investing $1k+ into a VR headset like Vive. $300 seemed like a very high return on investment for what I got. Not sure about $400 since I already have one but I'd probably still do it. I also made a fake, empty Facebook account to use the Oculus store, so I don't feel like it's a priv…

If you have the money, an index is the true experience. Quest gives me headaches and lenses have terrible godrays. You can't match eye spacing properly on quest, and it's software is junk. The UI hitches and causes nausea. Sometimes refuses to display menus or setup boundary properly and just sits there until I factory restore the headset.

Secondary FB accounts can be banned for not being the "real person" btw.

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#317

Post by gruez »

onepremise wrote: post #217
parkingrift wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I also made a fake, empty Facebook account to use the Oculus store, so I don't feel like it's a privacy invasion. You're kidding yourself with that. You gave Facebook literal eyes into your home through an internet connected device. If you don't think Facebook know who you are I have some coins I'd like to sell you.

Not to mention they can now Id you based off your retina scan. They can also profile your house and products you use in your house. Facebook is reckless with data. Just read up on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They were even sharing facebook messenger conversations with third party data consumers.

>Facebook is reckless with data. Just read up on the Cambridge Analytica scandal. They were even sharing facebook messenger conversations with third party data consumers.

I did, and it says that they gave message access to users that authorized it to. Saying "Facebook is reckless with data" because of this makes as much sense as saying that google is "reckless" with your data because people are constantly downloading shady flashlight apps and granting them location permissions.

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#318

Post by CursedUrn »

jedberg wrote: post #254
kranke155 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VR will never become mainstream. I’ve been working in VR since 2015 and I don’t use it daily. I don’t know a single person who uses it daily. Maybe if you’re mildly autistic or remarkably introspective it works for you. For most people it’s a fundamentally alienating experience, like taking LSD but with none of the joy. VR is fundamentally an industrial technology, good for training and other purposes. For entertainm…

> I don’t know a single person who uses it daily. I know a bunch of people who use it daily. They are all using Immersed[0] for work (disclosure, I'm an investor, but I invested because of the love their early customers had for the platform). Basically, you get a bunch of virtual monitors in VR. It's way cheaper and much more portable than dragging five massive screens around, and the isolation is the point -- you ca…

How do you get any work done with a big heavy uncomfortable weight on your head?

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#319

Post by TMWNN »

pavlov wrote: post #80
digdugdirk wrote: post #29

Is VR broken out on the Meta balance sheets in a way that we can track profit/loss/expenditures that are associated to VR specifically? Anyone at Meta with a vague idea of how much of the company is working on VR specifically? It seems odd, like the "vision" is "VR Everything", but the reality is more "We bought Quest and don't know what else to do". Does anyone have any insight on how it feels inside the org?

Yes, Meta reports the AR/VR unit separately as Reality Labs. It lost $3 billion in Q1 this year, and about $10 billion in 2021. The number of employees working in this pillar exceeds 10,000, I believe. For the past years Meta has been building the entire stack: chips, novel controllers like wrist neural interaction, a new operating system... But the ambition level has been somewhat reduced recently. The new OS projec…

It's definitely a passion project on Zuckerberg's part. Were he not CEO and controlling shareholder, it's definitely the kind of thing that a new CEO would cut. (Just like Blue Origin is a Bezos-personal-investment thing, not an Amazon thing.)

Re: Meta is raising the price of the Quest 2 to 400 USD

#320

Post by TMWNN »

jjcon wrote: post #144

Worth noting that this really only equates to a $50 increase on the base model compared to release since it was originally released as a 64GB set and now only 128GB is sold.

When Quest 2 came out in September 2020, 64GB was $299 and 256GB was $399.

A year ago the Quest 2 was recalled for a minor issue with the foam inserts. Oculus used the temporary discontinuation to replace the 64GB with a 128GB model for the same $299 price when sales began again in August.

Post reply on HN