The whole reason the Oculus Quest is so popular is because it is a standalone device.
My brother got one and loved it, he raved about how fun VR was. I had considered it for a while, but I wasn't ready to commit $1000-$2000 for a capable gaming rig + however much the VR headset was going to cost just to try it out.
Oculus Quest was the perfect way to try out VR for me, a couple hundred dollars for a pretty good VR headset. No need to have sensors on polls or anything. Super lightweight way to dip a toe into VR and see if the medium was a compelling experience for me.
I remember researching if I had to login with facebook and found that you could just make an Oculus account with an email address. Got it, enjoyed it, still enjoy it.
The decision to couple the Oculus Quest and your facebook account puts a seriously sour taste in my mouth though. I think that when that deadline comes up, I'll probably just sell it and buy something that doesn't have that requirement, it will likely be time for an upgrade anyways.
The Index is more than double the cost for something that requires spending more money for a computer to run the whole setup.
...not that that's for nothing, the results are better than any of Oculus' products graphically. But it's a different product.
Tracking-wise, there isn't a lot of difference. Certainly not enough to warrant giving all your data to Facebook.
The Quest stands out because the tracking is as accurate and consistent as on desktop class VR headsets. The software and user experience is a clear notch above any other standalone headset.
[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/399594551/2015-06-22-MARK-S-...
I think it might already be too late in terms of dominating.
Edit: Upon further research, these are business/enterprise only, so they are not competitors to the Quest which is consumer first.
On Reddit, there has been some coverage of those headsets in the past, eg [4], [5] and [6], but it's easy to miss. I still find headset analysis from VR YouTuber the best.
Also not all tracking is equivalent. Some headsets released by companies are truly atrocious.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/ThrillSeekerVR/videos
[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tyrielwood/videos
[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/mixedrealityTV/videos
[4] https://www.youtube.com/c/VirtualRealityOasis/videos
[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/7cs6jc/htc_vive_focus...
[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ektig3/first_new_vr...
[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/hjymnn/pico...
On the other hand, I have had some headsets that were "truly atrocious". The Meta 2 was one. Never before or since have I had an AR headset give me simsickness. The PiMax 5K, with its nasty distortion at any view angle beyond the ~100° average of every other headset and its sole raison d'être, plus red image static, plus janky sidecar driver program. The Pico Neo 1, where the facial interface cut painfully into the bridge of my nose (I have it on good authority that the 2 corrects this issue for Western markets).
I was super disappointed when Google canned Daydream. I thought the Lenovo Mirage Solo was way ahead of the market.
The Vive Focus's controllers are a little flaky, but not unusable.
The original HoloLens was way too heavy, way to narrow of FoV, way underpowered, but hand tracking and built-in voice recognition, and MR desktop metaphor was quite something. I have yet to get hands on the 2, so I'm eager to get one. There's a quality of life experience with the software and the development lifecycle that is really, really missing from every other platform.
My point is that we should legitimately ignore the terrible headsets, but try to be a little more forgiving of the flaws of other the "not best-of-the-best" headsets. We absolutely need market competition in headsets. We must not allow Facebook to dominate VR. That is their end-goal, after all, and it would certainly be to the detriment of us all.
In general though, I agree. There needs to be more 6-dof standalone headsets. I'd love to have a standalone WindowsMR headset. Something like HoloLens with lenses and OLED displays instead of the waveguides.
The Quest is pretty good, but it's not all that great to think that Facebook is an unbeatable juggernaut. Hell, all of the standalones (3-dof or 6) are still only running the Snapdragon 835 Mobile (not much more than clones of Qualcomm's first VR headset reference design), where the 855 and 865 have tracking on-chip. The 835 is not actually all that great for VR (it's what's running in my now-ancient Pixel 2), it's just the only SoC that hardware vendors have put the effort into. Hell, Qualcomm has two SoCs specifically for XR that nobody is using.
EDIT: correction, the HoloLens 2 is running on the 850 Compute Platform, which is mostly the same as the 845 mobile.
I also know someone who wanted to change their last name (their current one is already fake) and the system didn't let them without sending an ID.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/help/community/question/?id=1016165...
It was probably two months before my account was flagged for "suspicious activity" and asked that I submit a photo of a government-issued ID, which I never obliged.
However, now the create a new account page says there’s an existing disabled account with this email address, but the account support portal says one doesn’t exist! Top notch engineering. Luckily I have my IG account for Messenger login, but I can’t use it for desktop sign-on’s which is pretty dumb.
We made a Facebook account for Marcelo a few years back as a joke. One day a couple years in, we could no longer log into his account without proving his identity. We probably tripped some internal flags because it was being logged into by several IPs that also had their own Facebook accounts is my guess, that or someone not in on the joke reported Marcelo. Either way, Marcelo can't use Facebook anymore... A small inconvenience in our case, but this is definitely something that can and does happen to fake accounts.
Annoyingly, someone/somebot made a full mirror of my Facebook account one day and sent me a friend request as well as several of my friends and family. I reported it and eventually got back a response that the account was not in violation of any rules. That was years ago and I had forgotten about it until just now. Just checked today and it seems it's actually gone, but it was very creepy at the time.
If you really want to use a throwaway account and have a chance to escape their surveillance engine, use it on a separate machine, VPN'd to a separate network (where none of your real traffic ends up) and do not do anything on that machine that can be correlated to your real activity (no playing with friends for example).
Currently there is no reason to believe that Facebook should be trusted for anything (based on their past actions) or that the current regulatory environment (both US and EU) is effective at discouraging and punishing violations.
Wasn't this part of the settlement with the FTC for about 5 billion dollars? I'll agree with you it evidently is not enough to really deter Facebook but I wouldn'T call it nothing, that was one of the largest fines ever handed out.
Same in Europe, Google has taken significant fines. Those companies are not untouchable any more. And yeah I don't trust facebook that much either but I don't think they'll blatantly ignore the law intentionally.
Also don't forget that there is quite a social factor to VR and they are pretty much going in the "single player only usage without FB account direction".
I was going to get a Quest for Star Wars Squadrons until this came out. I don't care how much more the Vive is or how many features it's behind. Not worth reactivating FB for it.
They legally require you to give them honest/correct personal information.
Practically maybe.
But there is all the pairing with phone etc. requirement.
There are also all the information they likely will collect about usage patters, interactions and your PC. So if you don't also use a isolated throwaway PC/console account and don't use social features you can be sure they will be able to somewhat link your information anyway.
It not just about forcing increased FB marked share.
It's also about an additional source of information they can link and combine.
(Due to GDPR they are quite restrict about what data Oculus can share with the rest of FB.)
On a serious note, I see an opening for a new social network.
On certain pertinent internet forums you will find threads regularly where people are connecting with other's made-up accounts.
They're pretty much indistinguishable from real accounts, so unless Facebook starts implementing an ID requirement for all accounts, they'll never be able to stop this.
And even then determined people could be sending in fake IDs.
My recommendation for creating a fake account is, once you have seeded it with a few friends, just add most people facebook recommends you. Plenty of real people (the 900 friends facebook addicts) do this as well.
Personally I (unfortunately) do use WhatsApp while avoiding all other Facebook products. At least WhatsApp doesn't try to manipulate you and has some form of e2e encryption.
I recently deleted my IG (February) due to censorship issues, but still have a WhatsApp account on a burner device for talking to the few people I haven’t been able to get to switch to Signal.
It isn't the username and password which is the objectionable thing about Facebook.