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Please, anyone, desperately anyone, literally anyone, please, for the love of god, make a competing headset that doesn’t have this deep Facebook integration bul
by cwhiz 6y ago
Please, anyone, desperately anyone, literally anyone, please, for the love of god, make a competing headset that doesn’t have this deep Facebook integration bullshit.
I do not want to see this become the Oasis.
- tomc1985 6y agoWhat about Valve Index?
- msie 6y agoDon’t bet on Valve. They don’t have a killer business instinct. They take their sweet time to get anything done. Plus their Steam machine “console” idea was crap, anyone could see that from day one.
- rektide 6y agoIt's amazing how shortsighted & wrong one smarmy glib post can be. Valve is kicking ass, leading massive technical charged doing great & fantastic work with none of the typical Service-as-a-Software-Substitute slimeware that everyone else keeps falling to. Great novel hardware with very high bandwidth & compelling input, best if not only useful end user drivers out there as we see with projects like Monado XR that are practically unimaginable elsewhere. You're damned right they don't have a killer business instinct. They have a nurture protect & help instinct. They aren't on inside-out tracking, not yet, they are building far more reliable open systems for outside-in, & that makes them more costly. But you know what you are getting & you know the raw data right out of the sensor is going to be great.
- na85 6y agoThat's an interesting take. I don't follow the VR market at all, but from my perspective Valve has been resting on their laurels for years. I've read that gaben just sits in his office playing DOTA 2 all day. Until I read your comment I would never have considered describing Valve as "kicking ass". From where I sit they've basically done nothing innovative since Half Life 2.
- kipchak 6y agoDigital item economics/lootboxes/items is a big one[1], they even hired Yanis Varoufakis for a bit. They also did a good deal of the foundational work for VR working with HTC and Oculus. Then there's steam link, Steam controller/SteamOS/Steam Machines, Player created layers in Portal 2, Steak Workshop/Mod support (and paid mods) to name a few. There's a lot of not hits and a lot of not games, but they've been at least doing some stuff. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6Qn56QWI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-I6Qn56QWI
- tomc1985 6y agoI'd hardly consider the Index and Half-Life Alyx to be "nothing innovative"
- phaus 6y ago>Valve has been resting on their laurels for years. They aren't just a game development company anymore. Their primary product is Steam. If Half-Life Alyx was playable on any PC or console it would have been one of the best selling games of the year. Its only a niche product because, instead of resting on their laurels, they are trying to drive the industry forward. Not only did they make the Index, which is by far the best VR Headset yet, they also supposedly helped HP develop the Reverb G2 that's coming out soon. GabeN likes playing Dota but the idea that he sits around all day playing videogames when he's been building, improving, and expanding a billion dollar gaming empire is ridiculous. There's also the massive progress towards making Linux a viable gaming platform. Really the only thing keeping me on Windows on my gaming system is the fact that most competitive multiplayer games' anti-cheat software can't run on Linux yet. If I played mostly single player games or casual multiplayer I could play almost everything I want to on Linux. IMO they are plenty innovative. I wish they released more games, but aside from gaming they are doing a lot of great things for the gaming community.
- pfranz 6y agoI think it's been easy to miss a lot of Valve's recent work since they haven't been cranking out games. Here are a few things since 2013 when DOTA2 was released: * SteamOS, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, Steam Link (2015) hardware, porting Steam, Source, and tooling to Linux (and patching Linux to improve gaming performance). Cross platform and streaming features. Facilitating porting of games to Linux. * Source2 (2015) wrote a new game engine and ported DOTA2 to it. Neither is a small undertaking. * HTC Vive VR (2016) hardware, software, tooling, and VR content. None a small undertaking. * Valve Index (2019) * Half-Life: Alyx (2020) In addition, there were a few projects and games that never made it to market and a few I probably missed. I'm really happy to see them trying things nobody else is, even when they fail.
- cwhiz 6y agoValve is hilariously stagnant. The Steam windows app went ignored for nearly a decade until Epic came in and started eating their lunch. The mobile app looks like a contracted out app from 2009. Seriously, go download the mobile app. Half the products or ideas they’ve come up with abandoned, never release, or are mediocre. They lack any clear vision, strategy or direction as a company. They seem like they would just absolutely rest on their laurels and do absolutely nothing if it weren’t for pesky competitors ruining their laziness. The only reason Valve is in business today is because DRM forbids consumers from transferring their owned games to another platform. If I could abandon Steam I immediately would.
- rektide 6y agoWhat stodgy complainy whininess. I can play 60%+ of games on Linux because Valve cares way more than anyone else. Big Picture works great for a console like experience far better than anyone elses. Valve Controller let's practically any game under the sun be couch & controller playable. Remote Play, then Remote Play Together, now Remote Play Tablet blow everything else out of the water. I'm sorry the you doesn't meet your high pop culture desires? It feels much less glossy-plastic & more direct to me than Epic. That's just me I guess. The thing is, that is way way way way down my list of concerns. Steam is a technical juggernaut. No one else is even playing. Steam is super under appreciated. The lack of mainstream highly visible overwhelming successes doesn't bother me. Steam is innovating at the edge in radical ways, & they are always always always trying to spread the love, not steal the sunshine.
- puranjay 6y agoAnyone who says Valve is resting on their laurels clearly hasn't tried Half Life: Alyx. They've sigularly pushed VR further than all the other games and experiences out there combined.
- Certhas 6y agoAgreed. As far as my household is concerned there are two relevant VR experiences: BeatSaber and Alyx. (Serious Sam of all games gets an honourable mention). We would not own a Quest if not for Alyx.
- arsome 6y agoMy understanding is Steam machines weren't so much meant to be a console competitor or even a gaming PC competitor, they were meant to be a Windows competitor. So that Valve could basically just say "we'll start releasing exclusives for this" if Microsoft pushed the Windows Store hard and tried to kick Valve out of their dominant market position. Steam machines bought them a bit of leverage when they needed it.
- numpad0 6y agoThey do little but do right to secure dominance. Steam Machine didn’t work but Steam and PC gaming industry survived from PS4 and Microsoft Store. They let Oculus and later HTC run with their core VR knowledges but SteamVR/Valve Index is still considered the best platform/headset hands down.
- imtringued 6y agoI've seen HN comments that think if Epic and their games are kicked off consoles they are going to make their own console instead. I don't think "anyone could see that from day one" is true if people still think so about a different company, whose game store has less selection.
- CookieMon 6y agoIt costs 3 times as much and is tethered. Price aside, tethered is a different market. I like powering VR with a gaming PC, but a standalone headset with inside-out tracking like the Quest is where the mass market / oasis will be.
- scsilver 6y agoFurthermore, theres alot of moving parts in the tethered setup, easy to get bottlenecks in performance. I think right now this all in one device could compete on consistent day to day performance as well as dominating in flexibility and price.
- Certhas 6y agoAnd the quest is optionally tethered. I played Alyx on the Quest+gaming PC and it's an excellent experience.
- cwhiz 6y agoNot a competitor to the Quest, but a compelling product in that category.
- someperson 6y agoAt this point it's clear that Facebook have "won" VR. At least for the current generation that's mostly focused on gaming. The original Oculus Quest is already really good, and was constantly sold out for almost its entire lifetime, and now Facebook are selling a near-4K resolution headset with a top-of-the-line Snapdragon XR2 for $299. I have been considering starting an open firmware project for the Oculus Quest 2 (Snapdragon XR2), and too a lesser extent, the Oculus Quest (Snapdragon 835) and Oculus Go (Snapdragon 821). All 3 headsets are Android-based devices. Clearly, most of Facebook's innovations have been deep in the stack. The sensor fusion involved in 6DOF tracking and the approach taken for Oculus Link PC tethering are non-trivial problems that have taken entire teams of people years of work. It would be many man-years of work to reverse engineer and re-implement Facebook's work to the quality level seen in the Quest. But it can be done, and it would mean liberating the best value VR headset hardware on the market. A hardware platform that is poised to dominate over at least the next decade. This is Hacker News. Is anyone else interested?
- na85 6y ago>Is anyone interested? Honestly, I feel like you could position such a project as "Deconstructing Facebook's business models one step at a time: The corporation" and hire a lot of anarcho-hacker types while positioning the company as a social-good venture. I personally would love to get paid to gradually undercut and destroy facebook. I worry that 2 things would happen: 1. The company would become what it set out to destroy (evil) 2. Anarchist hackers are passionate but you'd have a hard time getting funding from any of the big reputable players. Still, that would be an awesome company.
- someperson 6y agoOpen-firmware has had a long history, with varied degrees of success. From RockBox for the iPod to the ReactOS open re-implementation of Windows. I think now is different. I think crowd-funding has changed the economics of such projects from a few passionate hackers working in their spare time to now being able to fund people working on such a project full-time. There's probably tens of thousands of users willing to pledge $100 into escrow on a Kickstarter-like service, paying out when somebody to creates an open Oculus Quest firmware capable of 6 degrees of freedom using inside-out tracking. This funding model and skillsets are suprisingly close to what's required to provide Android security updates to older phones and tablets, so there's a broader business to be built. Many of those users are probably willing to pay a few dollars a month so such software gets continued to be developed.
- jonas21 6y agoSo in other words... please invest billions of dollars developing a headset of similar quality so I don't have to log in with Facebook?
- ajavascriptdude 6y agoyes
- nxpnsv 6y agoPretty please?
- cwhiz 6y agoIt’s not just logging in. This thing is covered in cameras, sensors, and microphones. I don’t trust Facebook with my name, much less with detailed information about everything in my house. Absolutely fuuuuuck that. I’d rather miss out on VR entirely than create a FB account and give that despicable company any data.
- jtsiskin 6y agoThe amount of trouble they would get in if they were using that sensor data is astronomical. It’s not rational
- ryukafalz 6y agoAre you sure? Because their privacy policy says they can collect... >Information about your environment, physical movements, and dimensions when you use an XR device. https://www.oculus.com/legal/privacy-policy/?locale=en_US https://www.oculus.com/legal/privacy-policy/?locale=en_US
- justchilly 6y agoHow much would you be willing to pay for a comparable headset without a required facebook account. Clearly FB is planning to extract value from this, and is why they can price this at just $299. They're betting customers will give up some data/privacy for that low price.
- cwhiz 6y agoThe Quest was $400 and didn’t require a Facebook account. It looks like they cut some corners on materials to get the price down to $300. I would be willing to pay $400-$500 for a Quest 2 if it didn’t have the Facebook integration. More importantly, I’d like to see Facebook FORCED to provide a monthly dollar value that they think my data is worth.
- ponker 6y agoFacebook is probably selling this at a loss... who can compete with that?
- cwhiz 6y agoApple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Tencent, Elon Musk, Samsung, Huawei, Dell, etc. There is no shortage of companies who could compete with Facebook on a technical level. Just so far there isn't any. My hope is that Facebook creates the market and other companies come in and diversify it. Otherwise we'll be in some sad dystopia where the only way to get VR is to hand over all of your private data.
- Jestar342 6y agoHP's Reverb G2 looks really good.
- chrischen 6y agoJust make a dummy facebook account. No one is forcing you to give them your real personal info.
- jmiskovic 6y agoFacebook now requests personal ID when they suspect account is fake. They can ban your account if they find it to be fake, which also cuts access to any store content you've paid for. This is done automatically and quite efficiently by algorithms. They've now announced some kind of developer accounts for businesses that won't be tied to personal FB accounts.
- chrischen 6y agoI feel like if they started banning and cutting access to paid content they’d be doing something illegal or at least setting themselves up for class action. EDIT: i guess you’re right. They are that draconian: https://www.roadtovr.com/fake-facebook-account-oculus-headset-community-standards/ https://www.roadtovr.com/fake-facebook-account-oculus-headse... It’s no wonder they were banned in China. They’d rival the Party in big brother power.
- jmiskovic 6y agoThey have also voluntarily stopped selling in Germany. Most likely they anticipated gross violation of some policy. It would be interesting to know which one. On average EU has far better citizen protection mechanisms than US.
- Tepix 6y agoHTC is working on a XR2 based version of their Vive Focus standalone headset (source: https://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-focus-xr2-geekbench/ https://www.roadtovr.com/htc-vive-focus-xr2-geekbench/ ). It will be out in 2021. I hope it will be less than twice expensive as the (subsidized) Quest 2.
- aero-glide 6y agoFacebook is selling the Quest 2 for a loss? (Not that I would be surprised).
- aero-glide 6y agoYes. I hope someday mobile devices(like phones and VR sets) become like laptops - you can install an OS you want. You should own the hardware. I'm not a fan of the whole hardware-software integration.
- bhouston 6y agoYou can hope for this but it is more likely to be like mobile phones.
- btbuildem 6y agoAt this point the morally responsible thing to do is to reverse engineer the hardware / software and open-source it.