For starters we're in the middle of a huge financial crisis, so releasing yet another VR set, a 3500 USD one at that, is hilarious. To further hammer in how terrible the timing of this is, we are also amid so many tech bro shit schemes failing. Cryptocurrency, NFTs, you name it. The Metaverse was a laughingstock, Twitter is imploding from Elons idiot decisions, Teslas are literally crashing and burning and all major tech companies have been on the News at some point for fucking with people's personal data and other con jobs. AI is scaring people as much as it is entertaining them. Confidence in emergent technology is at an all-time low. It doesn't help that the promo poster features the most dead-eyed soulless-looking person staring through it at you. People are sick of it. VR headsets were already niche, who cares if it has AR or whatever tacked on? Sure, some rich yuppies will buy it to impress their friends, but they buy anything the market tells them is the next big thing and are a small minority (again, more poor people than ever at the moment)
TLDR this is going to be Google Glass again but this time even more of a flop because now people are poorer and more skeptical of big tech than ever.
Feel another 2008 in my worn millennial bones.
Also feeling severe tech fatigue. Now I even feel disgusted by Linux or free software in general. Technology become some hyper-speculative giddy playground that real lives are getting ruined by that has no way of paying back the huge debts or be relied on with any meaningful assurance. After the bubble bursts there should be a kind of butlerian jihad where we question how much time we are devoting to these things and how much they have screwed up our attention spans and mental health.
There are essential applications for computers but they don't need such a huge industry that the economy and the path out of poverty depends on. If anything the next iteration of these applications needs to come from public funding where software is developed to formal specification like with ATS2 virtual machines running on top of seL4. All this should be under Donald Knute's literal programming paradigm where software engineers must first provide comprehensive documentation explaining the code they are writing and algorithm they are using. This documentation should be legally available the public emerging from regulations and guidelines decided through whole process democracy.