Mark Zuckerberg is indeed responsible for setting fundamental concepts and strategies, and I'm certain that removing the passthrough switch wasn't the development team's decision, but rather a strategic security risk decision. If the team is making such strategic decisions independently, then Zuckerberg should do what I suggested and replace his leadership team. The same applies to prioritizing basic features, such as the usability of a German Bluetooth keyboard or fixing other bugs, like the spinning circle in the middle after an app is interrupted, or the menu that appears when turning off the headset, giving users exactly two seconds to make a decision. What kind of menu is that? Don't you have any quality control before something like that is released? Or is it simply a paternalistic strategy, and we're not even supposed to make our own decisions?
My criticism is directed at an overall strategy that Zuckerberg seems to dictate, and this permeates all his products—a paternalistic strategy that treats us consumers like idiots. Zuckerberg has never valued a logically structured and functional GUI. Facebook is a GUI disaster. If he were to start over today with this interface structure, he'd be bankrupt in a few years. The same goes for WhatsApp or Instagram. These days, nobody would endlessly search through menus, and everyone expects a modern standard for how to pause, move, zoom in, or zoom out on a video, for example. Anyone who doesn't meet these standards can no longer compete in the market. Zuckerberg is simply profiting from these applications by leveraging an irreversible mass market.
A Quest 3 isn't bought by children; we adults buy it and are responsible for our children. If an adult lets their children wander around unsupervised with such headsets, they are acting negligently, regardless of the built-in safety features. And if passthrough activates after someone bumps into the device, it's probably too late. This is another criticism: features are removed without warning, and nobody explains why.
Quest 3 isn't bought by children; we adults buy it and are responsible for our children's safety. We humans are creatures of habit, and if something worked yesterday and doesn't the next day, then that's wasted time spent troubleshooting. Why isn't the removal of the switch listed as a feature in the update description?
Another criticism is that basic bugs are never fixed, and I find it unbelievable that the open-source community develops software that is completely free and a thousand times better than what Zuckerberg is delivering here. ALVR (Open Source Streamer) is a hundred times better than this Quest Link application, which is riddled with errors and bugs.
ALVR: Extremely easy to configure, no crashes after interruptions, and no sudden latency shifts down to the second range. It also supports USB-cabled color passthrough. Compare the SideQuest application with what Zuckerberg offers us in his PC applications. I'm a developer with many years of experience. It comes down to willpower, or rather, to an overall concept and prioritization that I feel entitled to criticize. Without the additional features from the open-source community, which make the headset usable for an adult, it would have been gathering dust in my closet long ago.
It's a shame about a piece of excellent hardware with the best price-performance ratio on the market, to say something positive, but for my purposes, I'm seriously considering selling this childish toy and buying a Crystal or some other new development for my simulations, one designed for adults, not children.
