Facebook Recalls 4 Million Quest 2 VR Face Liners Over "Rashes and Hives"
upstart writes:
Facebook pauses sales of the Oculus Quest 2 due to face irritation concerns:
Facebook said on Tuesday that it's temporarily halting sales of the Oculus Quest 2, a month before a planned update to a new entry-level model with more onboard storage. The move comes after several reported cases of skin reactions to the headset's included foam faceplate, the social media giant confirmed.
Facebook recalls 4 million Quest 2 VR face liners over rashes and hives":
Consumer complaints began piling up shortly after the system's October 2020 launch regarding rashes, burning sensations, red facial marks, and hives experienced while wearing the VR headset. These complaints often said that the users hadn't felt particularly warm temperature-wise, so they were not building up sweat within the VR headset's goggle portion. (My own review of Quest 2 mentioned so many complaints that I barely touched on my disdain for the cheap-feeling foam face liner, which felt like a serious downgrade from the Quest 1's fabric. Quest 2 is marked by a number of downgrades from its predecessor, arguably to scrape back savings to make room for its spec upgrades.) By early 2021, Facebook posted a minor acknowledgment of the issue and described the problem as affecting "about 0.01 percent" of system owners.
That Facebook post was updated in April to confirm that the company had detected in the liners "trace substances" that "were already at levels below the industry standard," without clarifying what those substances were or what industry standard it was referencing. Did Facebook mean "as compared to commonplace facial gear like ski goggles," or did the company mean "with regard to virtual reality masks," an industry that has yet to receive decades of product-review scrutiny?
In either case, Facebook pledged to "change our process to reduce [trace substances] further," but the company didn't remove the material entirely from the liner that makes constant contact with users' faces. That action may have still run afoul of the CPSC's rules about appropriately labeling anything that counts as an "irritant," which the US agency defines as something that "causes a substantial injury to the area of the body that it comes in contact with. Irritation can occur after immediate, prolonged, or repeated contact." Facebook has yet to clarify the exact source of the existing face mask's irritation-including whether the culprit was the foam itself or any chemical treatment sprayed onto the foam ahead of being shipped to customers.
[*] US CPSC: U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission.
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