can we really call it standalone if you need it to phone home to Meta? and doesn't it require an account one of their services too?
they did a fantastic job with hardware. I just wish they didn't couple the software so tightly.
they did a fantastic job with hardware. I just wish they didn't couple the software so tightly.
Yes.
The current problems sound like a server-side bug while it phones home. But usually it can work fine without internet.
Standalone just means the VR compute is happening on the headset itself, not on a console or gaming PC the headset is tethered to. Of course, most of the people disputing "standalone" already know that, they're just playing definitional games.
It's the equivalent of finding out that if Microsoft's auth servers go down no one with a Windows PC can use it since they can't authenticate. I'm fairly displeased.
Yes, because etymologically it's "standalone" vs. "wired"; this is akin to how phones are "mobile" vs. (when I was a kid) "landline".
It would be cool if Valve came out with a standalone headset, they're one of the few companies I can see that would be in a good position to do that: they already have a good amount of VR experience with one high-end headset + SteamVR APIs + a couple VR games, they have their own highly popular store/platform, they generally have a positive reputation with gamers, and they have a decent amount of hardware experience in general including the recent Steam Deck for mobile gaming hardware specifically.
And of course, a Valve headset would probably be significantly more open than the Quest. The Steam Deck has gotten some good reputation among more FOSS/hacker-oriented people for being fairly open: you can use it in a regular Linux desktop mode, you can install Windows (or presumably other OSes) on it, it's fairly repairable, etc. The default behavior is very console-like, but it's not very locked down if you don't want it to be. Best of both worlds, really.
I view VR headsets and their peripherals as no different than a mouse, keyboard, and display.
Companies requiring all this nonsense to use your device, put in that light, is ludacris.
Edit: Can we just acknowledge that a lot of the bells and whistles are for the companies benefit at the expense of the user? Thats their right, but it's also our right to want something better.
Correct, it's very similar to game consoles, though it is somewhat more open than those (sideloading is possible, including standard Android apps IIRC, and you can run PC VR games from other stores while tethered).
> Can we just acknowledge that a lot of the bells and whistles are for the companies benefit at the expense of the user?
It's the same model as XBox or Playstation, seems like. They sell the hardware at cost or at a loss, and make it up via software.
A fully open headset with comparable specs would probably cost much more for the hardware. From a business standpoint that would be very stupid for a company like Meta, but this is hacker news, and many commenters here see nothing wrong or silly about asking businesses to commit suicide.
This doesn't explain why its _required_. It just means there is precedent.
Your other point is better, although I think you mean it would cost the consumer more for the hardware, right? The hardware would cost the same to produce, it's just that the company would miss out on surveillance based revenue.
It's a reasonable point, fb would make less money if they made an open headset, possibly to the point that they wouldn't make it all.
But the world where fb doesn't make any headset, and the world where they make an unacceptable headset are basically equivalent to me - the former might even have an edge in that shitty relationships with corporations aren't being encouraged (like they are throughout everything tech related currently). Granted, them blazing the trail has a tiny chance of enabling a reasonable alternative to come along in the future.
But I am a bit of a Luddite, and I know that people want their toys, and they want them now.
More than likely most of Meta's revenue from the Quest series other than hardware is based off of, y'know, selling games. I doubt tracking what games you play to target ads in the OS is more valuable than the money they make when people actually buy games.
In Facebook or Instagram, you're looking at a space that they can shoot lots of ads into, and it's otherwise very hard to monetize. But a gaming-focused VR headset is a different story. Most of the time you're not looking at anything that can have ads in it, but you can actually sell stuff very easily.
Maybe this'll change someday if they actually get social media shit in there that's popular, I'm sure Meta would love that, but so far that hasn't happened.
> But the world where fb doesn't make any headset, and the world where they make an unacceptable headset are basically equivalent to me
Popularizing the format is useful for pushing the tech forward. A big player pushing lots of devices means that the supply chains feeding the manufacture of those devices bulk up too, not to mention other knock-on effects like greater consumer awareness, and "free research" for whoever copies what the market leader does (at least for things that aren't IP-protected).
> But I am a bit of a Luddite, and I know that people want their toys, and they want them now.
I can hear the sneer from over here, yes.
Isn't that a great argument for why they don't need to have such a hard requirement for a logged in session? Consoles didn't have an internet connection for the longest time, though only because it wasnt feasible yet. They moved a lot of games.
> I can hear the sneer from over here, yes.
I don't mean it as judgment, I know I'm the weirdo here. Sorry if that came off rude.
Consoles had physical games. VR headsets don't. Consoles treat digital games the same way Meta is doing them here, I think; if you get logged out, no more games.
The problem here isn't that Meta servers are merely down -- losing connection usually doesn't mean losing access to your library of games on consoles, or Steam. The problem appears to be that authentication is failing such that you're actually being essentially logged out, which would definitely lose you access to digital games on every console as well as Steam.
Which, I mean yeah, that's a big fuck-up on Meta's part.
Again, consoles and steam do this because they want to, because it benefits them, and consumers don't put any meaningful pressure on them for doing so. It's not some kind of fundamental requirement. It's helpful for e.g. anti piracy stuff, but not necessary. It is 100% feasible to sell me a digital copy of a game and then not hang around on my system and watch me play it.
People let triple A PC games basically put rootkits on their systems. It's not like the games wouldn't work just fine (or better even!) without them. It's just that approximately nobody cares, and the companies will do whatatever you let them do.
That could be valid when VR headsets were tethered to a PC via a DisplayPort or HDMI connection and essentially mirrored the display.
The Quest is closer to an iPhone or Android phone or an all-digital handheld gaming device. With integrated compute, display, battery, text input, pointing devices, mic, and speakers, it bears little functional resemblance to peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, or display with no utility unless slaved to another device.
Considering I can use my Quest with no wifi or other network to log in (once initial set up is complete), it seems that the Meta back-end APIs must have broke in some way that confused the headsets into thinking they were available when they weren't.
As you say, there's valid criticism to be made but it's hard to find the signal through the noise.
This makes it a device that's generally capable of using any supported source for its screens, and can pass its peripheral input to other devices, like a PC, not unlike a mouse and keyboard.
VR headsets could treat their "OS" as a minimal experience akin to an OSD on a monitor that lets you switch sources and use the peripherals more generally like a mouse/keyboard with the right drivers on the target machine.
I'm more interested in calling out that Meta missed an opportunity here, and that it's confusing that they offer some semblance of these features (wireless linking for SteamVR...) while coupling that so closely to their OS and online-only experience.
First, the original Rift headsets were as you describe: lightweight, passing through the PC VR image. However, Meta did not miss out on an opportunity. In what was perhaps the most effective A/B test they could run, they released the Rift S (tethered PCVR) and Quest 1 at effectively the same time. The market feedback was resounding: I believe it was a 10-to-1 preference for a standalone experience vs. tied to a PC. Since they doubled down on standalone (or all-in-one if you prefer), well over 20 million headsets have been sold. In fact, they're so popular that even the fraction that connects to Steam is basically tied for market share with the most popular PC VR headset ever, the Index.
Second, even as a PC VR HMD it was a real stretch to call it a monitor equivalent. It's wildly complicated to create compelling VR images. You need two screens at nearly 2Kx2K resolution each, running at 90 frames/second, sustained. Dip below that and you can induce nausea. Not every PC can do that, so you need careful engineering between the client and HMD, with tricks like time warp, space warp, interleaving, compression, prediction, pose estimation, etc. to take up the slack. Creating sub-millimeter precision of location with six degrees of freedom either requires external base stations (cost, complexity) or inside-out tracking with headset-mounted cameras and a processor running realtime simultaneous location and mapping and image recognition code, which implies a CPU and tech stack to support it. Nowadays people also expect passthrough (with real-time depth correction), hand tracking (AI routines for hand posing), and more. All this is to say that significant code must run on the HMD for a modern gaming headset (Meta's target market), as well as on the PC. And if you're investing that much in a custom software stack, you can't make it up on hardware margin - the cost to build an HMD is just too high. So you have to have an app store tie-in, because Valve sure isn't going to share its Steam profits with you.
Now, certainly there have been (and are) HMDs that tried this approach. HP (G2) and HTC (Vive series) both put out quality products leveraging the Steam ecosystem. Neither are sold in volume today, because the economics of selling a headset just aren't good enough.
Immersed and Big Screen are releasing very lightweight fixed-function HMDs for either work or movie watching that do operate the way you describe. Neither are expected to be high volume devices, and both are more expensive than Quest 3.
In short: VR is much, much harder than you may realize. Meta didn't miss an opportunity, the explicitly chose the market-tested, most popular solution that also has an economic model with some potential future payoff. If you want a "minimal experience akin to an OSD" then look at the Big Screen Beyond ($999, https://www.bigscreenvr.com/) or the Immersed Visor ($1,049, https://www.visor.com/). (Note: compare the price of these hardware-model pass-through devices to the Quest 3 ($499) which also includes a CPU, battery, storage, audio, more RAM).
It's also worth noting that Quest 3 is not online-only. It works fine offline once you've logged in once (people use it on planes, in parks, in the car, etc.). But this particular issue at Meta forcibly logged out users, then the API appeared online while failing all future login attempts. Ironically, users that work offline never noticed the outage because the bug couldn't log them out.