I work in VR, here’s why I am boycotting the Meta Quest Pro | Hacker News Reader

I work in VR, here’s why I am boycotting the Meta Quest Pro

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42 pointsZacnyLos21 comments

The author is boycotting Meta Quest Pro because it lacks accurate hand tracking, a feature that Deaf & Hard of Hearing people rely on. Recommend changing the title to reflect that. This author has done extensive, unpaid work on the platform to make it more accessible and has been a strong advocate for accessibility features, but it seems that Meta has not prioritized this functionality. That is a shame, and should be illegal.

should be illegal?

what kind of stuff are you people smoking, how are posts like this even real

Enough Americans agreed with them to pass a (poorly designed) law purporting to do exactly that: The ADA. So even if you disagree with them it's not as absurd a position as you colorfully claim.

There are many people affected but perhaps is not enough to prioritize, the law seems appropriate to balance the scale

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/quick-statistics....

A little empathy goes a long way when thinking about issues that intersect technology and people with disabilities.

> This author has done extensive, unpaid work …

> … and should be illegal.

Are you saying that volunteer work should be illegally? Or that volunteer work must be implemented?

Edit: probably not!

> Meta has not prioritized this functionality

> That is a shame, and should be illegal.

The lack of prioritization of accessibility features is what GP thinks is a shame and should be illegal.

Not prioritizing important accessibility features, presumably, is what they believe should be illegal.

I'll defend Meta for once. Let's take accessibility out of the picture for a moment.

Imagine you have an idea to sell a product and have 100 potential customers. Your research indicates 95% of those prospects need a set of use cases to be solved in order to be convinced to buy the product. 5% need a very unique, different, and challenging set of use cases. What should you do with your $10M product development budget for version 1.0?

Does it make sense to equally prioritize both sets of use cases and users? Of course not. If your company was developing a new product/service, would they not prioritize requirements based on the percentage of customers that would benefit from each?

If Meta never addressed people with disabilities, that would be a major PR problem for them. They have billions of users today and obviously want all of them and more in their metaverse. Is it realistic to believe they'd forever ignore the huge, raw number of users with various accessibility needs? No.

I mean no disrespect to people in wheelchairs, but isn't it a bit silly to add support for avatars in wheelchairs instead of working on solving actual accessibility problems? Virtue signaling 101...

Better reason to shun it:

https://www.wired.com/story/metas-vr-headset-quest-pro-perso...

What are the last five stories you remember with regard to Meta's handling of personal information?

What are the last five stories you remember about is successfully amplified on their properties?

...

They should have rebranded as dystop.io

What asinine reasoning. How dare they don’t spend thousands of manhours on an extremely tiny user base in the first iteration of their pro device.

Accessibility should be fundamental to production in professional organisations.

This is not basic accessibility.

It really is, though. For VR. Hand tracking and leg tracking are vital to people's senses of body in VR. It's part of the dumb excuse why Meta's avatars didn't even have legs for so long: without good leg tracking, seeing fake legs that didn't respond like their own legs was literally making people motion sick. More people can live with bad hand tracking, it won't quite yield the same motion sickness, but it's still one of the next most cited reasons people come out of VR sessions hating it ("I can't see my own hands 'right'") even before it's a communications issue that many people talk and gesture with their hands even before it's an accessibility communications issue that there are entire, common languages in use in the world by minority populations that heavily or exclusively rely on hand signs and arm movements.

This seems pretty basic VR accessibility if you are expecting people to 1) not be sick/hate the experience, and 2) communicate with each other.

There are rumors that a depth sensor, shown in early cad leaks, was removed very late in the design. Perhaps it’s related.

Early leaks suggested that controllers wouldn’t even be included.

Source: SadlyItsBradley, who mentions this in his latest bingo video.

It's not really a boycott if it's just one person. Boycott implies concerted action by a group. Best of luck though. I'd refuse to buy Meta's hardware for other reasons. A Facebook account required to play has been a dealbreaker for every single one of their headsets.

> I joined the W3C Immersive Captioning Working Group and presented and hosted panels for the XR Access Symposium where I proclaimed the benefits of Quest 2 over other headsets because of the hand-tracking features and it’s affordability

Acting as an unpaid advocate for Meta's platforms and then getting burned on the next release because the flagship features you liked weren't included should not be surprising. I get it sucks, but I'm not sure what else could have been expected here. Can regular platform users involved in peripheral community advocacy typically expect to see attention/cooperation from Meta?

I would figure that if you really wanted to create a stable platform for use by a specific community, you'd be running as fast as possible _away_ from Facebook but that's just me. If anything the fact that the author has already advocated for the Quest 2 is indicative of the _opposite_ of a boycott. Your community already bought into the last-gen because you told them to.

I feel gross "defending" Meta here but

> A Facebook account required to play has been a dealbreaker for every single one of their headsets.

This is no longer the case, you can now set up a separate "Meta" account. Now, how far you want to believe/trust that is up to you but they did remove the need for an actual facebook account.

Does anyone believe there's any meaningful privacy difference with biometric collection between Facebook or Meta account?

FWIW (and related) I checked the main announcement pages for notes on accessibility and inclusivity - ideas that really should be fundamental to production now - and couldn't find a mention of them. Perhaps I've missed one, or they are in the videos...

What are good alternatives? I have someone asking about one that is 'affordable' for them, used.. I'd like to suggest something that is good, not just cheap or most known.

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