Do you wanna jump on the digital advertising train too and give Meta even more of your personal data? Great! Because even if you’re not, Meta will somehow find a way to subtly back you into a corner and unwittingly do so. Sleazy motives aside, Meta’s adding a new heart-rate tracking element to its Quest VR headsets, essentially allowing users to sync their heart rate monitors with the app to track their response to various VR experiences. We can already picture this making YouTube headlines under the ‘Reaction Videos’ category. 

Heart of Your Sleeve

As per Meta: 

“One of the most-requested fitness features for Meta Quest has been heart rate tracking so that you can easily see tangible and real-time results. With our new heart rate feature, you’ll be able to see your heart rate, when measured by a Bluetooth-enabled heart rate monitor, even while you’re in a VR workout.”

If you look at it carefully, it does make a bit of sense, especially if you consider the popularity of VR fitness apps, and especially this time of the year, when everyone is attempting to pursue ‘healthy’ New Year’s resolutions. However, given Meta’s track record on personal data usage and management, many will also likely have concerns about sharing even more of their data with the company.

To their credit, Meta has advanced its data protection processes significantly, and even changed its name, partly to distance itself from all the negativity that has besmirched its (then) name. The whole Cambridge Analytica Scandal happened when Meta was still, for the most part, Facebook.

Still, it can’t be helped if there’s some hesitation. Meta’s Portal sales were partially slowed by people’s hesitance to enable Meta to listen into their conversations in and around the home. Meta ended up shelving the project last year, and it’ll be interesting to note the broader response to this new data tracking element, and how comfortable people are in connecting more data sources to the company’s data banks.

Essentially, Meta needs to enable more tracking to provide a more immersive and engaging VR experience. Meta’s also working on wrist control devices for VR, which should provide a more intuitive control interface, along with different forms of motion tracking, as well as body scanning for avatars, etc.

All of these elements require users to upload more of their personal data to Meta, which it now approaches by requesting people to hook up their heart rate monitoring devices, which is relatively simple. To add, Meta will now also enable Android users to connect their VR devices to Android’s Health Connect System to track their performance and VR workouts.

The Wrap

Again, it’s a fairly logical move by Meta, especially with most people still fuelled by the New Year’s health pill. Now is perhaps the best time for Meta to make a push on this front as part of a broader integration. Despite the expected hesitancy, Meta can circumvent such barriers by highlighting the value they can offer. Quest headsets can integrate with heart rate monitors from Garmin and Polar, while Meta notes that other monitors that use Bluetooth can also be paired up with their headsets.

Sources 

http://bit.ly/3iDsB0u