Meta Quest is a mess of a rebrand we don't want or need

techradar.com:

Oculus means an eye-like opening and when applied to the world of VR as it was when Palmer Lucky launched Oculus VR in 2012 and later with Oculus Rift and Quest VR headsets, it implies a view into another world. But now that eye has squeezed shut, blinked in confusion, and reopened as Meta Quest: a Frankenstein word salad that means less than the sum of its parts.

Meta, formerly Facebook, announced the changes late last year, soon after renaming the entire Facebook conglomerate to steer into the heady fumes of a still unrealized Metaverse. Everything Mark Zuckerberg's creation would do from that point forward would be in service to building out this virtual world and experience.

At the forefront is Meta's sizeable investment in Oculus, which it bought for $2 billion in 2014. Since then, it's done an admirable job of funding the research and development and growing the brand with new, more affordable, and consumer-friendly virtual reality headsets including the Oculus Quest, the Oculus Quest 2, the upcoming Oculus Quest 3, and the bleeding edge Project Cambria.

These headsets are the doorway to what is still a vastly underdeveloped Metaverse. There's Facebook's Horizon Worlds and, that's pretty much it. Despite the disappointment of the current Metaverse experience, Oculus' role as the standard-bearer for what the Metaverse might were bound to its branding: it's about seeing, and seeing is believing in the Metaverse.

The new name, which is now starting to appear on social media and, it seems, inside the Metaverse (Horizon Worlds), force-feeds Facebook's new Meta brand, making «Quest» its unwilling partner. To be fair, the former Oculus Team, now Reality Labs, is 100% on board with the rebranding.

As Reality Labs VP of AR/VR