Carmack on Oculus, Minecraft, Meta and Microsoft | Hacker News Reader

Carmack on Oculus, Minecraft, Meta and Microsoft

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On an unrelated note, in 2021 Carmack and Meta announced [1] unlocking the Oculus Go bootloader, explicitly mentioning that it "opens up the ability to repurpose the hardware for more things today, and means that a randomly discovered shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now will be able to update to the final software version" [2].

I thought that was great, wanted to hack [3] on it a bit, so I went ahead and bought an Oculus Go on the second hand market. Turns out that the quote isn't true at all [4]. Updating the firmware requires enabling developer mode [5]. Enabling developer mode requires activating the Oculus Go with a Meta or Oculus account [6]. I don't have or want to have a Meta-related account, and in twenty years the online activation process likely won't work at all, making Carmack's shrink-wrapped headset useless without a fight.

I'm sure the point is moot in twenty years because you'll just ask Skynet to write you an Android root exploit, but right know my second hand Oculus Go is surely acting like a brick in my drawer.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/27/22696030/oculus-go-root-a...

[2] https://xcancel.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1441496416463904768

[3] https://github.com/AndroidDevice-Porting/android_device_ocul...

[4] Although at first I couldn't believe this and assumed I must be doing something wrong instead. I'm still not ruling out that possibility; I would very much like to hear a solution.

[5] https://developer.oculus.com/blog/unlocking-oculus-go/

[6] https://ez-360.com/knowledge-base/how-to-enable-developer-mo...

> twenty years from now will be able to update

> requires activating the Oculus Go with a Meta or Oculus account

I wonder if Carmack knew about this requirement at the time of his quote, or if the rug was yanked out from under him after the fact. Are there any account systems that have lasted 20 years without having the plug pulled on them?

My RuneScape account is the same and over 20 years old.

Try logging in with the game client from twenty years ago, which is the equivalent here.

Fair enough, though the game client is essentially the same as it was 15 years ago in that case. Point taken, though.

Pretty sure my Amazon and eBay accounts are about that old by now.

ICQ, until recently

Would you be able to do it with a fake account, and if having done that process today makes what he said entirely true? I get there’s a product manager engagement injected step but it seems harsh to say “isn’t true at all” when you mean “he left out a step that’s required that I don’t want to do.”

> Would you be able to do it with a fake account

Of course, although it also requires a setting up a 'fake' phone number. I just don't want to touch the Meta ToS – as I haven't for more than a decade – even with a ten-meter anonymous pole.

A better solution would be to ask a friend to activate it, but I haven't because there were other yaks to be shaved.

> it seems harsh to say “isn’t true at all”

You cannot activate an Oculus Go today and "randomly" discover the same activated "shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now". I'm just trying to correct the record, as AFAIK the news stories about this have been undisputed since 2021. It's a fantastic achievement that the bootloader can be unlocked at all, and I certainly hope that it will set a precedent (but I won't be holding my breath).

What if Facebook has gone out of business in 20 years?

would you use a VR headset today from 20yrs ago?

I am generally against creating unnecessary e-waste but let's be real, it will likely be better to recycle it and experiment with something else in that time frame...

On the off chance that I would be using VR headsets in the first place - I might.

Much in the same way I will happily play a well maintained pinball machine from the last millennium, or an arcade game in a lovingly restored cabinet from 30+ years ago.

There is an allure to retro-gaming with MAME (which I love), but for some of us, going properly vintage can have a special meaning.

I don’t know, it was Carmack’s hypothetical not mine.

I was playing around on a 486 machine the other day. It's not impossible someone might.

Yes?

The retro computer museum in Leicester has a few of the Virtuality systems, which are still great fun.

Loads of people hack on old hardware.

I have 2 Google cardboards on my shelf.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S6 that is still on Android 7 so I can still use the GearVR headset.

I think work still has a carton or two of actual cardboard boxes with plastic lenses that you shove any random phone into, from when we were doing VR meeting stuff back at the beginning of Covid.

Then do it now and it’ll be unlocked.

That is not really what Carmack suggested in his quote. I’m not saying it is necessarily some huge loss, just pointing out that we still haven’t managed to pretzel our brains into an interpretation that makes Carmack right.

You're comprehensively missing the point. According to Carmack's hypothetical, someone in the future could discover a unit and unlock it even if they were born after Facebook/Meta went out of business completely. But that just isn't true if a Meta login is required.

Yes. However you can imagine a world where he is right but someone along the way put a hurdle in, yet his essential goal is correct given in the present you could do this and in 20 years use the device as he described. To say he’s entirely wrong, which was what was said, is extremely ungenerous.

> "opens up the ability to repurpose the hardware for more things today, and means that a *randomly discovered* shrink wrapped headset twenty years from now will be able to update to the final software version"

No, the device in his hypothetical is randomly discovered, so it is not ungenerous to assume that the person discovering it randomly didn’t happen to have set up a dev account. Because most people don’t have these types of accounts, a random person discovering the device should not be assumed to have one.

Additionally, he’s clearly describing something serendipitous, not something that requires planning ahead by 20 years.

You didn't need a meta account for developer mode initially.

You could just toggle it in the settings. Not sure when they changed it (and if this change was pre or post his quote)

That would make the quote true, or at least for early produced models. However, in guides created two months after the release of the Oculus Go, it was was already necessary to create an account: "before you can put your device in Developer Mode, you need to have created (or belong to) a developer organization on the Oculus Dashboard" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQQDyC2I0R0

> Turns out that the quote isn't true at all

To be clear (too late to edit): the latter part of the quote.

Yeah and the go isn't really an interesting product anyway.

I was really hoping they would do the same with the Quest 1 which they've deprecated now too. But they haven't. I guess the firmware has too much in common with the 2 and 3 for them to consider open sourcing it. Or it was mainly Carmack who pushed for this with the Go and he has left the company since.

> Yeah and the go isn't really an interesting product anyway.

It's a basic, relatively inexpensive model that was sold widely with over 2 million units until July 2019 [1] and continued to sell for 20% of Meta VR until it was discontinued in 2020.

It still carries about a third of it's inflation adjusted 2018 introduction price on the second hand market, and was a logical product to buy in sets of 10-30 for applications like education, science and parties. As Meta stopped "accepting new Go apps and app updates after Dec. 4, 2020." [2], those sets already became obsolete for new applications using the regular developer tools.

A few months ago, some users wrote on Reddit that "90% of my apps stopped working" because Meta "shutdown the entitlement check server" [3], but that seems to have been fixed despite ending support. Sideloading works like you would expect [4] from Android after you've enabled developer mode (which I haven't tried).

Two people on Github managed to run CM 14.1 on the Oculus Go and published the device tree [5]. There doesn't seem to be much interest and it's a rough build for me. The readme claims that everything works, but I'm skeptical.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/12/facebook-oculus-will-never-b...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/23/facebook-to-end-oculus-go-vr...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusGo/comments/1csvj8j/90_of_my_...

[4] https://vault.gearvr.net/

[5] https://github.com/AndroidDevice-Porting/android_device_ocul...

Ah yeah I understand, it's just that without 6DOF tracking and tracked controllers it's not much more useful than a Google Cardboard.

I would really love to see an open sourced Quest 1 <3 That would be really something new to play with.

I do find that comfort issues (i.e., nausea) make it hard to port non-VR games to VR. Movement just has to be a lot different in VR to avoid the nausea, either more focused on teleporting or changing the basic structure of the game so that the player is still or confined to a small location and the world moves around the player.

I let my kid play a pretty simple game on the Quest that had regular joystick motion and an hour later she was sick and threw up. The effects of VR can be surprisingly delayed and non-obvious.

Not everyone gets nauseous or motion sick from VR. I think it's okay if some VR games are designed around joysticks, as long as teleport mode is still an option.

I remember in the early 90's people similarly would develop motion sickness from the FPSs of the day, such as Doom and Quake.

Different games affected me differently, when I was 13 I could play Goldeneye 4 player on the N64 for hours with my friends but the Turok multiplayer focused game I could only handle 30mins before I would get nausea. I grew up playing Doom and Quake on PC without issues. Some games still make me sick, Dark souls 1 I have no issues with but Dark souls 2 is unplayable for me. Also I can play Rocket League for hours and feel perfectly fine. The source engine in VR was the worst experience for me and now when ever I see half life 2 in motion it makes me sick.

It’s quite varied and I would like to figure out what the common denominator in all of this that triggers my nausea response.

I used not to belong to this group, but shortly after my son was born, I started to get motion sickness from a few different things, including some old games (e.g. Shadow Warrior)

Perhaps due to hormonal changes?

Does the version matter? E.g., same response with 360 DS2 VS. PS4 or Xbox One? It might be consistency of framerate or FOV.

I haven’t tried on recent consoles so all my current gaming experience is on PC. I have played Rocket League at both sub 60fps and 200+fps and with narrow and wide fov and it didn’t change anything for me so I don’t know if it’s that.

I am one of those people! I got over it once during the Doom era, then a second time during the Counterstrike era. I keep trying to get used to it a third time but it hasn't worked.

I don't know whether the games changed rendering in some way, or my monitor is too big, or it's just age.

I couldn't play Wolfenstein without getting nauseous, but for some reason doom was fine. I think ut is ok to release a video game that some people can't enjoy. We don't forbid flashing lights, and that can send some people into actual seizures!

I still get motion sick after a while when watching someone else play an FPS. If I'm playing myself there is no problem. I can also get motion sick as a passenger in a car, but have no issue driving.

This is still a thing. My partner can't play Skyrim in first-person mode, only in third-person mode, because of motion sickness.

Doom on SNES was instant motion sickness for me. Thankfully I only rented it from blockbuster!

The Meta Quest store has comfort ratings for all games, indicating the likelihood of motion sickness. Children are particularly prone to motion sickness in VR, partly because their proprioception is less developed and also because they often have narrower IPDs than the headset minimum.

There are a variety of tricks that help a great deal when using joystick-based movement controls; while they don't work for everyone, they can work for a good majority of users when implemented well. There's the obvious stuff like being absolutely fanatical about controlling motion-to-photon latency and avoiding violent and uncontrolled camera movement, but there are a variety of less-obvious stuff like using vignetting to reduce the FoV during motion and making all acceleration instantaneous.

I'm occasionally prone to motion sickness when playing some flat-screen games, but I've had no issues with games like Onward and Ancient Dungeon on the Quest.

The current VR mod defaults to teleport mechanics. Most people can become tolerant to camera motion over time.

When I worked with people who had been writing code for VR for a long time a large portion of them didn't use VR much because of nausea issues. I don't think tolerance is as easy to achieve as people think, and can get worse over time instead of better.

I think some people become tolerant of a mild unpleasantness. But just as many people end up finding the entire experience unpleasant for reasons that aren't obvious to them (but I suspect are related to nausea), leading to VR's very poor retention.

Many people even get nausea from playing non-VR first person shooters, or things like too much screen shake. Nowadays most games have a slider to increase the field of view, which decreases nausea, but for a long time it simply wasn't known that this is an issue. There are some problems which people don't tend to complain about, they just avoid products which cause those issues, apparently "for reasons that aren't obvious to them".

I’d note the experience is not dissimilar to motion sickness, which despite being present in some humans, hasn’t stopped us from using cars or boats. Use of cars and boats allows people to become adapted to the experience through the amazing plasticity of the human brain.

Now, the use cases for cars and boats might be more compelling for sure, and maybe for those that experience this discomfort its benefits don’t outweigh the unpleasantness of the adaptive period, but I’d note motion sickness isn’t universal, and for smaller motions like automobiles (probably more similar to VR than boats which are an extreme), not even that common.

Figure skating is evidence that one can "train" one's vestibular system to ignore the mixed signals.

Now that I think of it, an anti-nausea VR training program would be excellent to treat motion sickness.

Is it? There are not that many figure skaters in the grand scheme of things. I’d assume there’s some element of self-selection going on along with the training.

Figure skating doesn't induce mixed signals I believe. The mixed signals from VR presumably come from the inner ear accelerometer giving different signals than the visual system.

in my experience most people need to use VR intermittently for about 2 weeks to fully adjust

i really struggled with vr initially but having used my quest 1 since pre pandemic it's fine and no longer have issues when using it for an hour or two

I don't know if you know this but kids throw up for many reasons besides VR nausea. Are you sure she didn't throw up for some other reason?

I played Minecraft a lot when I was younger, and I really don't think the game (any game, really) would be improved by wearing 600grams on my head or having a screen 3cm from my eyes. Aside from the novelty, which quickly wears off, I am yet to see a compelling reason to play more than 15 minutes with a VR/AR game.

So I have done both, the thing about VR is how scale comes across. I got hooked on it all over again in VR (Vive Bedrock Mod) because suddenly everything in the game felt immense! It's less a novelty and suddenly a whole experience. I will admit I played in shorter sessions, but more than novelty level.

I really want to like VR, but the ergonomics do suck. That doesn’t even touch on needing a fairly large open space to play in, or the nastiness of sweating into a headband for an hour.

I do think there are features that make it very close to worth it.

The sense of scale is unbeatable; having to move my neck upwards triggers some kind of “damn, that _is_ big” response.

VR can actually trigger my fear of heights, which is actually weirdly fun when you know there’s 0 actual danger. It’s very cool to build something big enough my monkey brain is afraid of falling off of it, and not because I don’t want to drop my inventory.

Combat feels more frantic when I’m actually frantically spinning and swinging my arms. It just isn’t the same as whipping a mouse around and clicking.

The games that keep me in VR are racing and flight sims.

https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1827363452194619692

I don't really understand what he's talking about. It seems to be a reply to something else but I don't see that.

I can't see it either, presumably it's in reference to porting Minecraft from the title

So John Carmack created a VR port of Minecraft, but Microsoft is holding it back from release...

You'd wonder why. Also he said that Microsoft developed it further. Why not release it?? It would be a great addition to their offering.

Someone somewhere in the management chain decided it hurt microsoft more than it helped microsoft, likely due to believing it asymmetrically helped Meta more.

What is the context? How do I view who he is replying to?

If you're logged out: you can't any more.

Nitter (and clones) remains the only way I look at Xitter these days, and this instance is being tossed around elsewhere in these comments, works for me: https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1827363452194619692

Scroll up. It took me a second. I've never found twitters UI intuitive for figuring out context.

Doesn't work. Looks like it's just not possible

If you are not logged in there's no way to follow a thread on Twitter's UI after Musk took it over, nothing up, nothing down, just a single tweet without further context. It's worse than a paywall.

There was already a Minecraft VR: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-gets-plays...

I see him very different since he signed off on that covid paper code.

Unrelated (sort of). I wonder if there will be UX implications 10 years out when most people who use computers grew up with Roblox and Minecraft.

Say more. What ux implications are you thinking of?

This ink is useless for anyone without a Twitter account. Is there a summary?

There's a dead reply (ah, it stopped being dead just as I submitted this) providing a link to a twitter frontend which gives context. Not sure why it's dead but here's the link from that comment: https://xcancel.com/id_aa_carmack/status/1827363452194619692

I thought x banned this sort of API usage

Ah thanks I was looking for the same <3

""" Andrew Fox @afoxdesign Seriously, Minecraft VR should’ve been a thing years ago. Building stuff with a buddy in fully immersive 3D. How is that not a hit

John Carmack @ID_AA_Carmack We had it on Oculus Go — I did the initial port, then the Microsoft team did a full integration. I had it working in 6DOF on Quest, but other parts of Meta were negotiating with Microsoft to get some Xbox titles instead, and in the end we got neither. It was a damn shame. """

6DOF [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_freedom

When they came out with HoloLens, Minecraft was the obvious killer app for it. But my mind has long ago stopped boggling at the number of ways Microsoft can find to not do the smart thing. Especially in gaming.

Boz (CTO at Meta) in a reply:

> We have tried to make our case to our friends many times! Tell any friends you have at Microsoft!

I remember playing Minecraft VR ages ago, 2018 maybe? Maybe it was a mod or something, I guess.

It wasn’t very good, the game is all about hopping around very fast on waist-high blocks. I don’t normally get any sort of VR sickness but Minecraft was too much for me.

Plus the cubes feel awkwardly sized to interact with.

Yeah, I have tried shortly a Minecraft VR mod on Oculus Rift.

(Shortly because I don't care about Minecraft, in fact I think that might have been the first time I even tried it ?)

I thought that the official Minecraft VR/AR version had been released years ago ?!?

> We have tried to make our case to our friends many times! Tell any friends you have at Microsoft!

- boz

Dupe. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41340180

Off topic: I think there’s very serious ethical implications with linking to siloed app ecosystems from the open web. There’s a paradox of tolerance hiding here somewhere. The web is significantly worse today than it used to and I think we’re making it worse by allowing these players to exploit the openness of the web for their own gain while rejecting it when it suits them.

I get what you mean, but that stops mattering with companies that go into full enshittification mode. Your point only applies when tacit cultural norms have power, not when they're being broken for all the advantage companies (and people) can get.

...or if there is meaningful competition. Sadly no other product has been able to actually replace Twitter so far.

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