Posted Jan 10, 2023 10:15pm
Virtual Reality: Meta drops users of his first Quest headset
Facebook’s parent company will discontinue software updates for the standalone device, which will be marketed under the Oculus brand.
The standalone virtual reality headset was launched in 2019 as the Oculus Quest.
Meta
Via email, some users learned that the days of their Meta Quest (formerly Oculus Quest) headset were numbered. The device is no longer entitled to new software updates. And buyers of this headset, marketed in 2019, will even be deprived of social functions in Meta Horizon, the immersive version of Facebook. Meta will now only be content to fix critical vulnerabilities, and only until 2024.
For the new year, the same Quest headset version 1 users had been forced to migrate to a meta account using a confusing process. Not sure if they can offer the end of 2020 version 2 for over 450 Fr., which doesn’t offer much more functionality despite significantly changed hardware. And I’m also not sure if they will rush to version 3 which is expected by the end of the year while Meta’s metaverse is still under construction.
In any case, this should not improve the level of awareness of the group around Mark Zuckerberg, which was already badly scratched among early helmet fans. The latter had already digested the task of the pioneer brand Oculus with difficulty. For the record, Meta, then Facebook, bought Oculus for around $2 billion in 2014. Palmer Luckey, the company’s founder, left the company three years later. John Carmack, ex-Technical Director of Oculus, stayed until the end of 2022. Upon his exit, he was not sympathetic to the development of Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, speaking in particular of self-sabotage and wasting resources.
(laf)