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> 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.