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Comment by cracrecry | Hacker News Reader

As you said, you can not compete against Facebook by price. They don't have billions and will NEVER be able to compete on that field.

They need to sustain themselves and do that with something that facebook could not copy.

While OQ is way cheaper, it also forces you into using facebook accounts and you pay with your personal or even worse, with your company information, that is way more valuable than the cost of the simula.

A surveillance device with two cameras and microphone and eye tracking of your workers is something unacceptable for lots of companies.

The price is OK if they manage to offer something that improves productivity and make companies money. Juts a month of paying an engineer is way more than this price.

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I think that's an important point as well that we haven't communicated yet.

Our software won't phone home. The cameras will have a kill switch. If we include a microphone, so will the mic.

I don't care if it makes companies money or otherwise benefits them. I want this to be accessible to ALL hackers, on a personal basis, whether they are backed by a corporation or not.

And for that to happen, the cost must go down. Just like the PinePhone is IMO the first practically obtainable phone designed to be hacked, we need something like this for VR. Otherwise we'll just end up with a bunch of Librems that only rich US engineers can enjoy.

Not the same thing at all. Smartphones have reached the point where further improvements are largely superficial for years now. Pinephone's price point is only possible because of over a decade of the proliferation of cheap smartphone components.

Consumer VR headsets are nowhere close to that point. The Quest 2 is right at the edge of usably clear text for work - with a price point that is only possible through the backing of a giant corporation desperately gambling their future on their whole metaverse shtick.

Trying to do better means requiring optics and display technology that is going to drive that price point up, especially for a hackable headset that is automatically going to rule out monetisation through user data.

tldr: nobody should care about providing cheap hardware to entitled "hackers" at their own loss. Hardware doesn't grow on trees.

OK, I agree. Why are you calling me entitled, though? I'm not demanding that the headsets be sold at loss. By "I don't care whether it makes companies money", I meant "I don't care whether it makes more money for the company purchasing them" (because the context of the discussion was that it would be companies purchasing these headsets for their own corporate efficiency reasons). A selling company must obviously make enough money to keep the production line going, how is it sustainable otherwise?

All I am saying is that:

A) certain conditions need to occur for a hackable home headset space to flourish

B) said conditions haven't occurred yet, and will not until the price comes down

That was not clear to me at all from the context but maybe I lack reading comprehension.

Otherwise, I think we are in agreement.

The pinephone is totally useless.

For your use case. For someone else's, it's useful enough.

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