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Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

Facebook should have never been allowed to buy them. It is really annoying because there is basically no alternative to it if you want a stand alone VR headset.

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History will not look kindly at our stupidity for allowing the creators of Pervy Stalker App to buy up the only good VR tech.

There are some good news on this front. Recently, ByteDance (owner of TikTok) acquired Pico, Chinese Occulus-style headset. I have their hardware and it's not on the same level as Quest - yet - but getting close. They also have a couple of great solution that Quest was lacking: balancer in the back, eye tracking in newer headsets. I hope now that they have bigger cash stacks, they can spearhead a competition race.

(it also makes sense, as Quest doesn't work in CN due to blocked FB)

How is ByteDance-controlled ecosystem a lesser evil than a Facebook-controlled one?

They do not have a "stand alone VR headset".

It's tied to the FB cloud. Not standalone AT ALL.

HTC Vive, Vive Pro 2 are stellar and fun. I use it with Steam. VP2 is basically market leader right now. The Valve Index is also wonderful.

There are rumours that Valve will enter the game

They already did. A lot of companies entered the game, but none of them can sell headsets with such heavy losses as facebook. None of them have successful all-in-one headset which after sometime facebook has learned is the headset type that sells (not everybody has money for 2k pc).

No. This: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/29/22699914/valve-deckard-st...

But that'll be like $899 if we lucky. Occulus Quest is like $300

There's a reason for that. I'm not sure I want to own hardware that facebook is willing to take a $300 + haircut on to get it into my hands.

Facebook also sells the Oculus Quest 2 for business. You need to activate it with a workplace.com account, but the headset no longer requires a personal Facebook account to work.

Incidentally, the business version is also twice as expensive and comes with a yearly $180 support subscription. The price of privacy, I suppose.

They make possibly the best overall VR system on the market currently, and it has been the best on the market for almost 2 years now. I've used the quest also, and there is no substitute for the processing power of an actual computer, not to mention ease of future upgrades via the pc.

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