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Comment by candiddevmike | Hacker News Reader

Aside from the Meta integration which will always be a non-starter for me, it would be great if Quest and other headsets followed Apple's design with an external battery pack. I wonder if there are/will ever be "dumb headsets" that are powered/ran by a phone.

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Do you know that you can create a Meta account with a one-time email address, fake name, and no connection to any other Meta service but the Quest platform? That may still be more connection to Meta than you prefer, but to many "Meta integration" implies an automatic linkage to Facebook or Instagram.

They only recommend your real name in case you need to recover your account.

From https://www.meta.com/help/quest/articles/accounts/account-se...:

---- To create a Meta account using your email address, you will need to provide:

Email: You can only create one Meta account per email address.

First and last name: We recommend using your real name in case you need to recover your account or manage your store purchases.

Birthday: You need to be at least 13 years old (or the applicable age in your region) to set up and manage your own Meta account. If you are between 10 and 12 (or the applicable age in your region), then you need a Meta account that’s managed by a parent or guardian.

Password: This must be at least 8 characters. Avoid passwords that someone could easily guess.

Presumably this also links to your shadow profile and all of the traffic to the FB tracking pixels from your IP.

You can extend your Quest with third-party accessories to do this. I got a better head strap with external battery support + 2 batteries and charger from BoboVR. With the magnetic snap-in the batteries can be easily replaced mid-play, in essence providing infinite charge time.

I have a Quest 2 and a Quest 3 - both headsets allow you to continue using them while they're plugged into an external battery pack or charger, so you can absolutely do this already.

I agree it'd be nice to have an external CPU pack for heat and weight reasons, but we're not quite there yet. The closest thing currently is wireless streaming via a PC running Steam VR, but that's not exactly portable.

XREAL Air do this, the headset itself is the size of sunglasses, and powered by the USB C used for display in.

I believe XREAL headsets are exactly that. Bulky sunglasses form factor, Pepper's Ghost optical setup, dumb display by itself + 3DoF for comfort with an adapter, takes DP Alt input.

Pretty much yes, there are already hints that this will be coming but for the current experience what would be the benefit Quest with battery included is already the same weight as the Vision Pro without the battery. So just add an external battery bank via USB and you have the same weight experience

Yeah, as a first-gen Quest owner I got no idea what they're going on about. My favorite feature is how light it feels with the battery included - I can use it comfortably with no wires for 2-3 hours, then take it off and let it recharge. If I need more runtime, I plug it in.

If Meta made new versions of the Quest without the battery built in I think I'd actively avoid it.

The very first gen of untethered headsets were powered by the phone. They quickly realized that the phone stack in that phone stole too many resources to reach the performance they wanted. The Quest came out "shortly" after that Carmack presentation.

> with an external battery pack

Why? There's are already 1000s of external batteries. Unless you mean you think Meta should do it so they can charge 4x of any other battery like Apple does?

Quest is also lighter than Vision Pro, even with it's built in battery

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