With Oculus' mandatory Facebook policy, it's up to Congress or EFF to save VR

nwn.blogs.com

21 points·Kroeler··5 comments

personally, I think it's up to devs to make good games to save vr. Noone else is interested in making vr headsets and competing stores because vr games so far have not really been that great after the novelty wears off, most of them them are more akin to tech demos than games. the only game I find myself coming back to is beatsaber. HTC, basically the only other headset maker and having the backing and Frontpage advertising from steam and valve, is leaving the consumer market, I think that should be telling

>HTC, basically the only other headset maker

HTC headsets were widely regarded as having poor build quality and mediocre support. I'm glad to see them gone.

Besides Oculus, the new HP Reverb G2 will be launching soon with native SteamVR support (and no Facebook requirement) and Valve's state-of-the-art Index headset is an option for the high end.

The VR games market is just getting started, like with PC games 30 years ago it's going to take a while to nail down a standard control scheme and mechanics for VR games. It's still early days but titles like Half Life: Alyx give me hope for the platform. All it needs to do it get more affordable, which is bound to happen as technology improves.

One of my favorite VR games (Crisis Vrigade) is only available on the Quest via sideloading because it apparently doesn't meet the FB store's standards. I also thought Half Life:Alyx was really compelling

open source will solve this problem. We'll have to build a LInux-based Oculus OS with an open app store and interface. webxr is coming along nicely (the w3c proposal)

Sounds great, but we're still begging for halfway decent 3d drivers that aren't binary blobs.

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