Oculus will allow sideloading and rooting to avoid e-waste

The existing sideloading, other than on PC desktop, was only for developers (no cost, but you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and more). Other than the lack of cost it was more similar to Apple's limited developer sideloading than it was to sideloading on Android for mobile. This is actual consumer sideloading and root on the device.

Not before activating the device and allowing sideload with a non-frozen account.

> It’s really good to see an engineer and leader who thinks of the greater good and what follows.

There's something incongruous about "thinks of the greater good" and "designs tools that are unquestionably being used to further his employer's mass surveillance mission" being applied to the same person.

Carmack is smart enough to know that the greater good involves not working for an ad surveillance company.

I don't think people out of the HN/tech bubble find FB accounts to be particularly hostile, and the number of people who will go through the rooting/sideloading process necessary for either of those two things is statistically nonexistent.

It will probably only be available for EOL devices.

Isn't this the same with Android phones and google accounts? Or iphones and icloud accounts? Like android had custom roms without google, i guess this open the path to roms without fb?

I think no can disagree that this is at least a step in the right direction

Would gladly pay it. Which is why I have an index.

In fact this is exactly what I expected at FaceBook.

What I didn't expect is that he managed to pull this off at all. Wow! And well done.

No

I wouldn't recommend VR for anyone under 12-13 or so. Eyes are still developing at that age and there's a possible chance of screwing up focus with extended VR use.

Pretty questionable whether you should be letting a five year old use any VR headset. Oculus Quest specifies only ages 13+ and the science is definitely not settled as to how VR use would affect motor coordination development. If nothing else, the ergonomics really are not going to work for a child that young using any headset released to date (and I don't imagine any company sticking their neck out to release a targeted pre-teen headset anytime soon).

If you've got an old phone and $10, a 5 year old could have some fun looking around with Google Cardboard. The product was unfortunately victim to another Google product sunset in March of this year [1] but still works, and it would give you an opportunity to see if they actually like it and check how vulnerable they are to motion sickness. The lag and accuracy are pretty poor (depending on the phone's processor and accellerometer/gyro) but there's no sense spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on a 5-year-old's whims.

Unless, of course, they're actually your whims and you're using "my 5 year old wants it" as a perfectly valid excuse...

My 5-year-old has fun playing Mario on my 20-year-old Game Boy Color, but has no idea that VR or VR gaming is even a thing. Maybe I'll get him a Game Boy Advance SP or a Gamecube in a couple years...there was a Penny Arcade or XKCD or similar webcomic a few years back about someone who had artificially restricted themselves to games and systems released 5 years before the present so they could savor the improvements in game design without dealing with the availability issues. It was presented in jest but is actually a reasonable system, and saves a lot of money in the process!

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/googles-vr-dreams-ar...

The Vive is PC driven and can be made wireless with accessories. There are social games on steam that work on it and are mostly populated by kids. The headset is fairly heavy though and also somewhat large, and the minimum eye-distance setting is pretty high so I don't know if it'd fit a 5yo.

Nintendo Labo VR is for 7 and up. That's about as low as it gets.

It's a win-win play for them. Gain a small piece of developer goodwill by opening up an obsolete headset they don't care about anyways, like open sourcing a dead project. We will hope they will do the same for the Quest, but they'll only ever do it for obsolete models.

Yeah the Go is simply no better than a $5 google cardboard setup. Nice for a once off trick.

At work we use some of these with some stupid training app that is more about showing off than actual training. It's designed to pretend we're a hip and modern company while the user clicks through a few popups on a 360 degree photo slideshow.

As someone who's trying to push real VR this really hurts my efforts. When I try to introduce something like Arthur Digital for real interactive VR meetings people are like "oh yeah I saw that VR thing during training, it was cool but useless". They think they've seen all VR can offer. And it's making people sick with imperfect tracking (try leaning forward to look at something...)

3DOF / Cardboard style VR should die. It's holding back the industry now.

What would that mean for those? They don't run apps themselves?

It wouldn't surprise me if this leads to future versions of the Oculus being open-sourced. IIRC, Carmack was the one who really pushed for the Doom and Quake engines to be opened up.

(Which is the old-old generation hardware -- the Quest and Quest 2 succeed it.)

Use In Cognito mode (or equivalent).

twitter is inadvertently doing you a huge favour. Twitter is telling you to stop paying attention to twitter, which is really for the best.

Oculus hardware is quite good for the price, and since you can root it and sideload the Facebook point is moot now.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. Maybe you don't owe Facebook better but you owe this community better if you're posting to it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html