I refuse to financially support a company that is doing so much to hurt democracy worldwide.
Facebook is doing the boring work that people don't like to talk about in tech forums, and that's why they're able to make a compelling consumer product.
The only other VR company that seems to get this is Sony, and they're married to a 6-8 year product cycle.
I advise a few companies doing enterprise VR and they are all OEM'ing the HP Reverb at half your list price with 4K per eye and high quality 6DoF.
Are you going to try to integrate SteamVR, cut the price by a thousand dollars and try to sell a privacy conscious headset?
So, when do you plan to "cut the price by a thousand dollars"?
Feels like a rude rhetorical question, but the answer is presumably at some point where their volume gets anywhere near HTC or Oculus, if that ever occurs.
It's depressing though how far apart the price point is from what Facebook can pitch it at. I am interested in use cases that would fit out an entire team with headsets but it's a non-starter at $1k+ and completely viable at $300 per headset. Made worse, sadly, by COVID where sharing equipment b/w team members is now pretty unlikely to be viable so we really need 2x the hardware.
what makes you think that facebook hurts democracy? Weren't democracy hurt way before facebook due to TV, radio, newspaper, and whatever was the communication mean of the day? I think a lot of people are over reacting here. If anything, FB helps against wannabe dictators, see how critical everybody is of Trump? Without social networks I think it'll have been much easier for Trump to make the US a dictatorship.
I don't trust Facebook and at this point I simply cannot imagine any possible action they could take to restore that trust.
It's a real disappointment. I admire the product and appreciate the contributions of the engineering team to advancing the state-of-the-art.
They'll also know what gets your attention, what doesn't… unless you can control your saccades, that'll leak a lot of information about your mind-state while viewing Facebook-controlled media. They could, if they wanted to, blackbox reverse-engineer bits of you via controlled-input attacks.
VR headsets are basically the most creepy thing they could be tracking my behaviour with – perhaps second to the smartphone, since at least I can take off the VR headset.
And as soon it does I stop using it.
As for reverse engineering my preferences I'm not sure I care honestly - if it means ads I get are more relevant it might even be a good thing.
I don't know I just don't feel there's a lot of value in profiling me specifically and it probably only helps them in aggregate anyway.
I'm not against dats privacy, but if it gets me superior hardware at a better price point I don't see the downside.
I'm much more bothered by wall garden platform like Apple imposing Apple tax and will slowly roll off Apple devices.
Nah; only a few dollars a (time period), really.
Multiply that by all their customers and you have a lot of money coming in from the creepy tracking.
They've shown to be bad actors in the past with harvesting as much data as possible, even on people who don't have accounts.
Is that a completely legal firearm/sword in the background? Is that a MAGA hat on the desk? Care to explain that Antifa flag on the wall? Maybe you supported that politician that lost the last election?
Could you have a Falun Gong book on your shelf, or a poster with Tiananmen Square's "tank man"? Maybe an image mocking a country's leader as a cartoon character?
What if SpyCam2 sees/hears something "islamophobic"? This is merely illegal in some countries, but a ticket to a death penalty in others. What then? Should the authorities be notified? Will Facebook turn over recordings if asked or demanded by a court or pre-emptively send them?
All reasonable questions in my mind.
Let's go just a bit further. Are you prepared to adjust your surroundings and life to be completely PC, a sterile pokerface world devoid of any Anti-whatever-that-isn't-politically-correct items which might offend? That's the world that the East Germans suffered under, while the Stazi collected every available fact, trying to ferret out "traitors" among the populace. at least they were safe in their own homes, for the most part (although some important conversations took place in the rest room, with the water running, to hide from microphones).
So should you fail to hide your unpopular thinking, at the least you'll face a 30-day ban from the hardware+software you paid for. If you're not so lucky, they might just have to call the authorities, or the religious police, you know, "for your protection."
Now add monitoring/recording/cataloging of your speech... are you comfortable knowing everything you've said is TOS-approved? Will it remain so, forever? doubtful.
Think this is absurd? It's not. Oculus just became part of Facebook's platform. Try any of the behaviours above on facebook and see what happens. (hint: enjoy your ban)
That's not entertainment. That's Dystopia: Big Brother invited into your home, re-imagined as a face-hugger with cloth straps.
EDIT: never mind. I won't be getting the Quest 2.
"All future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook account, even if you already have an Oculus account."
https://www.oculus.com/blog/a-single-way-to-log-into-oculus-...
If the only way to avoid Facebook is to not play, I'm not playing. It's just that simple.
I hope Valve can produce a competitor. Index is doing just fine but the target markets are different.
A) An algorithm flags your newly-created account as "inauthentic" and now you have to submit a copy of your driver's license to Facebook just to use a piece of consumer electronics you bought.
B) A different algorithm puts the pieces together and deduces that your burner account is the same identity as the real Facebook account you stopped using years ago or perhaps even "deleted." Nothing escapes the big-data inferences of The Graph.
Maybe I'm slipping through their net because my accounts are old?