Meta continues to field criticism over how it handles younger consumers using its platforms, but the company is also planning new products that will cater Meta is launching an educational hub in an attempt to make Quest the go-to device in classrooms.
I work with headsets for work. It takes me 5-10 minutes of basic interaction to get wildly motion sick, 10-20 minutes for headaches to start, if I have to wear one for more than 30 minutes that’s the only task I can do all day
They are heavy, can take a while to charge, often don’t last long on that charge, they get hot, people who need glasses are still an afterthought for a lot of the designs
What a potato of a tool to try and force into schools. The tech isn’t there yet and a lot of humans, like me, get physically sick when interfacing with them. Also what even is the use case they’re hoping to do better at than a bunch of laptops or tablets?
It’s a thinly veiled attempt by Meta to silence their critics and to divert attention from the organizations that are suing Meta, mainly the school districts and also state attorney generals, as their platforms are accused of facilitating abuse of children and intentionally creating addictive products.
If this succeeds, they will have a vast new data source to exploit and even more users they can not so subtly nudge to their other products, placing them in harms way in the name of profit.
They will inevitably encourage the students whose classrooms they overtake to support Facebook and Instagram, replenishing their depleting user base in the interest of satisfying their advertisers who are also suing their platforms for seemingly becoming overrun by bot activity.
Health and education is not the goal, but data acquisition and user growth is. They’ve already announced they will be taking “anonymous” usage data from their Oculus headsets, which I wholly believe is a lie as Meta has shown time and time again, is their modus operandi.
Personalized data is far more valuable than anonymous data, and they will secretly choose that route as they have in the past. The data collected is without a doubt, being used to train their AI systems.
I believe the use case they’re pursuing is “we don’t sell laptops or tablets, but we sell these things. MONEY PLEASE!”