Quest 3 Continues Meta's Sunk Cost Fallacy for a VR Mass Market That Does Not & Likely Cannot Exist

Zuck: We spent tens of billions of dollars trying to turn Quest 2 into a mass market product, even buying a literal Super Bowl ad, but it still hasn't sold more than 20 million units. What now?

Boz: Thinner and weirder and more expensive headsets!

Yes that's literally what they did:

Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced our next-generation virtual and mixed reality headset, which launches later this year. It’s called Meta Quest 3. It features higher resolution, stronger performance, breakthrough Meta Reality technology, and a slimmer, more comfortable form factor. Quest 3 will ship in all countries where Meta Quest is currently supported this fall. The 128GB headset starts at $499.99 USD, and we’ll offer an additional storage option for those who want some extra space. Mark your calendars because we’ll have lots more to share at Meta Connect, which returns this year on September 27.

In fairness, today's announcement also includes news that the Quest 2 price will be dropped back to $300, a smart move. (Which corrected Meta's own failed strategy with Horizon Worlds versus VRChat and Rec Room last year.) Also, I don't mean to slam Quest 3's technical specs: For niche but extremely valuable applications of VR, such as physical and medical therapy, this new headset should be a valuable improvement.

But Meta claims much more with Quest 3, even calling it "[O]ur first mass-market offering to deliver both cutting-edge VR and MR experiences in a single device, setting a new benchmark for future headsets."

But if they couldn't reach a mass market with a much less expensive HMD, what makes them think they'll do so with a better much pricier model?

And that only pays into part of Meta's sunk cost fallacy, because as I write in Making a Metaverse That Matters, we have no evidence that the company has addressed that small problem in which half the population tends to literally puke in VR:

Shortly after the Oculus purchase was announced, esteemed academic danah boyd, a Partner Researcher at Microsoft Research, published a much-discussed opinion piece in the online business site Quartz, proactively entitled: “Is the Oculus Rift sexist?” In it, danah brought up an earlier study she had published that strongly suggested VR tended to make women nauseous.

I’ve repeatedly asked Meta about this and received no reply. In 2017, I asked John Carmack himself if the company had tested its product by gender to address the issues that danah had raised. He wasn’t sure: “I’m not involved with any of our user studies,” Carmack told me then, “so I don’t have any insight there.” He pointed me to Oculus’ PR contact, but my question to them yielded no answer.

Much more on that soon! 

Comments

[Martin K.]

> In it, danah brought up an earlier study she had published that strongly suggested VR tended to make women nauseous.

It should be noted that the studied VR experiences made a lot men nauseous, too. And since many cybersickness studies depend on self-reported data, part of the effect might be due to men being less likely to admit how sick they are than women.

In any case, I would argue that the worse sexism related to VR happens in social VR as studied by Jessica Outlaw, e.g.: https://www.extendedmind.io/why-women-dont-like-social-virtual-reality

[Martin K.]

But if they couldn't reach a mass market with a much less expensive HMD, what makes them think they'll do so with a better much pricier model?

I don't believe that that's what they want to achieve with Quest 3. All Quests are just stepping stones towards AR glasses (delivering ads to your face all day long - a vision codenamed "the metaverse"). And it was interesting that they admitted in the gaming showcase that all this VR gaming stuff is just stepping stones: https://www.youtube.com/live/g1XPjUCmhXQ?feature=share&t=817

The specific function of Quest 3 might be to introduce consumers to (video pass-through) AR experiences and to controlling experiences using hand gestures instead of controllers. (My hypothesis is that next year's rumored Quest will be essential a Quest 3 without controllers.)

[L]

We, the Facebook (Meta) stockholders who got in during May and June of 2012 have reaped our rewards many times over. Many of us have wondered in meetings why Vanguard and Blackrock don’t get together and remove Mark now that he’s way pass his prime, and I’ve got no good answer to that. And now with the completely ridiculous $500 headset, Mark has insisted on, we are once again realizing that there are no new innovations coming from Meta and they have burned through their ideas. Companies like Nvidia are reinventing marketplaces with remarkable results while Meta is like an old worn-out cow, just laying there in the shade chewing the chew.

[TonyVT Skarredghost]

VR makes statistically more women nauseous than men, but this doesn't mean that all women get nausea and all men do not. Plus there are VR legs: I got nausea the first time I tried VR, and now I have not anymore.

The real problem of VR is consumer use cases more than sickness...

[Wagner James Au]

Yes, a subsequent study checking danah's research found that 75% of women experience nausea in VR, versus 40% of men:

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2017/03/vr-motion-sickness-women-danah-boyd.html

That's quite a lot, all told! Roughly 99% of people can comfortably use a smartphone.