Yes, and I don’t expect this to change much in the foreseeable future, given current technological constraints. But why would you expect a third-generation product to suddenly change this?

It’s a bit shocking mostly because of the scale of investment.

Meta alone has spent $36B on VR. To put this in perspective, iPhone development cost $3.6B. It’s the fastest, largest single investment into a new technology. https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-meta...

For the cost of this object, we could have built 3 new subway lines in NYC WITHOUT dealing with our cost disease.

For the cost of the object, you could set up a university program to figure out Anglo cost disease, then build ~10 subway lines at Japanese costs.

Asking why our society funds things the way they do is a very reasonable and responsible question

As a slightly less wonky comparison, the entire market cap of Delta (the largest airline in the world by market cap) last year was $23B, so Facebook could've just outright purchased Delta and still had over $10B left over.

And then they could have gotten Delta to build a virtual reality headset!

(And possibly gotten a better outcome, seeing as Delta has a helluva lot more experience than Facebook with ergonomics and normal people)

This is misleading. $36B is for all of Reality Labs, which includes Virtual Reality, but also their Augmented Reality glasses in development, Ray-Ban smart glasses, Horizon, Meta's AI org, the Portal product line (now discontinued), the unreleased smart watch, tons of R&D, etc.

> Unless it passes some unknown threshold where it suddenly becomes good enough to suddenly be really popular, they’re still trying to prove relevance.

Depends on what you mean by relevance, 20 million Quest units have been sold which is more than Wii U lifetime sales (13.5 million), and about equals lifetime Gamecube sales and current Xbox Series S/X sales.

I'm sure it's not meeting expectations given how much they have subsidized them and how much they've spent on the metaverse, but I'm not sure I'd say the Quest itself is irrelevant. There's clearly an appetite for it.