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At 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

At 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 ago
  Open-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.
  - na85 6y ago
    Maybe, but I think the market for a Facebook-free Oculus is smaller than one might think. Your average xbox dudebro probably uses instagram quite prolifically and isn't in the "protect my privacy" camp.
  - matty22 6y ago
    I would 100% Kickstart a Quest-like (wireless, 6DOF, inside-out tracking) competitor that isn't wrapped up in surveillance capitalism.
  - Ruthalas 6y ago
    I for one, would support that patreon!
- jyrkesh 6y ago
  Whenever you talk about startups with people outside the HN-like crowd, they always ask you about "your ideas", particularly if you assume you have all the funding lined up no problem. My go-to response is always "put Facebook out of business". I've been thinking about it for probably 10 years, I still have no idea what that means, but your post here got me a little stoked it could be possible
  - cubano 6y ago
    It's unclear how creating a what-sounds-like a rather expensive open source VR system could possibly put Facebook "out of business", considering probably 99 out of 100 people have no idea FB even owns Oculus. Also, FB's core business is ads sold to businesses trying to reach users doing social networking stuff...how does this even touch that revenue? At this point, I don't think FB will ever be put out of business given how old their core user base is, knowing that older people loath tech changes.
amansidhant 6y ago
Interested! I’m really passionate about VR/AR and would love to work on something in the space. Currently an undergrad. How can I contact you?
- someperson 6y ago
  I already have a decent amount of experience with Linux internals, but my next project is far less ambitious in scope: simply reverse-engineering the Android-based firmware on a Huawei router and creating a drop-in replacement. There is a lot of foundational hacking to be done around the Oculus standalone headsets. I don't believe the headsets have yet been cracked to unlock the bootloader to launch unsigned firmware. It's probably worth moving discussion over to a forum and Wiki dedicated to such reverse engineering efforts (such as XDA developers) [1] I do think that now is the time for such a project, and that crowdfunding has changed the economics to make this possible in a way that it never has been before. [1] https://forum.xda-developers.com/mobile-vr/oculus-quest https://forum.xda-developers.com/mobile-vr/oculus-quest
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Ping me at my HN username at gmail with your resume and I can forward it to oculus recruiters.
ghostpepper 6y ago
Why do you think the bulk of the Oculus innovation is deep in the stack? Is there much custom hardware in the Quest 2 or is it similar to a phone in a different form factor? How much of the accuracy of the sensor fusion algorithm comes from the inherent accuracy/calibration of the underlying sensors? Has anyone tried bringing up a stock android distribution on the Quest 2?
- someperson 6y ago
  John Carmack does several hour-long sessions at every annual Oculus Connect event (now called Facebook Connect). [1] [2] He has often spoken about deeply optimizing virtual reality by peeling back all the software layers. From his annoyance at the Android's process scheduling on the GearVR to writing custom microcode for the Qualcomm chip's Digital Signal Processor to try and optimize playing PC games (over Oculus Link streaming) by encoding and transmitting video per scan line (instead of per frame). He said that up until a few months before the original Quest launched they weren't even sure whether they could get inside-out optical tracking working to sufficient quality, but that they just continued to iterate on the algorithms until it worked well. It's clear that most of Oculus' innovation are deep in the stack, seemingly pushed forward by the legendary John Carmack. Now that Carmack is merely the "consulting CTO" rather than working on these problems full-time there's real questions about whether Oculus' deep stack innovations will continue. Oculus Quest is effectively a smartphone in many key ways, but it has several monochrome wide-angle cameras for tracking. Also unlike smartphones it has active cooling fans for improved thermals. It seems there's a million little things than come together to make Oculus Quest standalone VR way better than any phone-holder based virtual reality platform that I've used. As far as an open-source custom firmware for Oculus Quest goes, I am unaware of any project that has yet cracked the bootloader to run unsigned code and then booted stock Android. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMIDaomx0GA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMIDaomx0GA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Inside-out tracking works perfectly well in the Windows Mixed Reality headsets too. It's not insurmountable.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
kruczek 6y ago
> At this point it's clear that Facebook have "won" VR. Eh, it doesn't look clear at all to me. It looks like its main advantage is slightly higher resolution than Valve Index and wirelessness. On the other hand from what I read Quest 2 only now will finally get 90Hz - this is what even old Vive provided. And Index goes beyond that - up to 120 and 144Hz. Also I wonder how Quest's screen quality compares to Index, besides resolution and refresh rate - couldn't find any information about Quest's field of view, pixel persistence or fill factor. And with Facebook behind Quest, I consider Index to be cheaper - I'll take $999 any day over $299 + my data. I'd say it's hardly a clear "win".
- kbenson 6y ago
  > And with Facebook behind Quest, I consider Index to be cheaper - I'll take $999 any day over $299 + my data. All that really means is you have enough disposable income that it's actually a decision worth even considering. For most people it's aimed at that's not the case. This isn't Gmail for free vs some paid service for $5/mo, this is more than three times the cost for something that already costs multiple hundreds of dollars.
  - kruczek 6y ago
    I'd say all it means is I value my data above $700, which I understand is not the case with many people. If I would not have enough disposable income, then I wouldn't buy Index nor Quest.
    - monsieurbanana 6y ago
      Your comment was about whether facebook "won" the VR segment, not whether facebook won over you specifically. I'm sure many people in hackernews value their privacy above $700, me included, but that's clearly not the point here. We're just a blip in facebook's radar.
      - OJFord 6y ago
        A squawked and ident'ed blip, linked to a/s/l and ML estimates of personal data self valuation and price sensitivity on VR headsets.
z3phyr 6y ago
I am into FreeBSD device drivers, but I would love to help out! Ping me.
moron4hire 6y ago
Putting aside the software for a second... I've thought a little on this as well, from time to time. Hardware-wise, I don't see how the Quest 1/Lenovo Mirage Solo/Vive Focus were anything much more than Qualcomm's reference design headset (https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/snapdragon-835-vr-development-kit https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/snapdragon-835-vr-de...). Different strap designs, minor variations on display modules, removing ancillary stuff like the cellular radio and GPS, but otherwise the same CPU, same GPU, largely the same cameras. With the Quest 2 running the Snapdragon XR2, a lot of the basic features of 6-DOF VR, with controllers/passthrough/voice control/etc, could be running straight on chip. (https://www.thundercomm.com/app_en/product/1584417287281447 https://www.thundercomm.com/app_en/product/1584417287281447) Qualcomm provides an SDK for VR on their hardware that touts all the things Facebook has always claimed were their own big innovations, like asynchronous time warp and lens corrections (https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/snapdragon-vr-sdk https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/snapdragon-vr-sdk) I can't find the link right now, but Qualcomm/Thundercomm are also providing a base Android image specifically for use in VR. Which is probably why you can build and install regular ol' Android APKs on all of these headsets and they map the controller to mouse actions. My point is, I am starting to doubt Facebook has all that much "special sauce". I think it's mostly just marketing. I think Qualcomm has done the hard work here and is happy to let other companies take the credit because Qualcomm is about chip licenses, not consumer electronics. Other than tuning parameters for camera positions, there should be no reason why the OS image for any one of these headsets to run on any other one. I think it's doable. I think you could probably root the firmware and get an open source OS running on any one of these headsets. And it'd also breath new life into systems whose creators basically got bored with not making a billion dollars overnight.
- cubano 6y ago
  I would tend to agree with you, but is's John Carmack leading the software group for it and I just cannot believe that he hasn't done a bunch of optimizations and other work. It would just negate a reputation that he has worked his ass off his entire life to build if he hasn't done valuable targeted work on the visuals of the device.
  - 6y ago
raxxorrax 6y ago
> The original Oculus Quest is already really good, and was constantly sold out I accidentally bought one until I realized the mistake and bought a rift S a day after that. Want to buy it? It is as good as new. Thought about selling it on ebay but got a bad conscience to sell it to some kid, even for a good price. Jokes aside I think not needing to connect a PC has to be the future, but I would expect the device to be able to run a conventional OS. Currently I think it will stay a dream however. Otherwise VR devices have amazing capabilities already. A few more pixels would be good, but you will quickly need a lot of processing power.
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  > Jokes aside I think not needing to connect a PC has to be the future, but I would expect the device to be able to run a conventional OS. Why, given the opposite has proven true in the mobile space? I wish they did, but consumers clearly do not value this.

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 ago
Open-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.
- na85 6y ago
  Maybe, but I think the market for a Facebook-free Oculus is smaller than one might think. Your average xbox dudebro probably uses instagram quite prolifically and isn't in the "protect my privacy" camp.
- matty22 6y ago
  I would 100% Kickstart a Quest-like (wireless, 6DOF, inside-out tracking) competitor that isn't wrapped up in surveillance capitalism.
- Ruthalas 6y ago
  I for one, would support that patreon!
jyrkesh 6y ago
Whenever you talk about startups with people outside the HN-like crowd, they always ask you about "your ideas", particularly if you assume you have all the funding lined up no problem. My go-to response is always "put Facebook out of business". I've been thinking about it for probably 10 years, I still have no idea what that means, but your post here got me a little stoked it could be possible
- cubano 6y ago
  It's unclear how creating a what-sounds-like a rather expensive open source VR system could possibly put Facebook "out of business", considering probably 99 out of 100 people have no idea FB even owns Oculus. Also, FB's core business is ads sold to businesses trying to reach users doing social networking stuff...how does this even touch that revenue? At this point, I don't think FB will ever be put out of business given how old their core user base is, knowing that older people loath tech changes.

amansidhant 6y ago

Interested! I’m really passionate about VR/AR and would love to work on something in the space. Currently an undergrad. How can I contact you?

someperson 6y ago
I already have a decent amount of experience with Linux internals, but my next project is far less ambitious in scope: simply reverse-engineering the Android-based firmware on a Huawei router and creating a drop-in replacement. There is a lot of foundational hacking to be done around the Oculus standalone headsets. I don't believe the headsets have yet been cracked to unlock the bootloader to launch unsigned firmware. It's probably worth moving discussion over to a forum and Wiki dedicated to such reverse engineering efforts (such as XDA developers) [1] I do think that now is the time for such a project, and that crowdfunding has changed the economics to make this possible in a way that it never has been before. [1] https://forum.xda-developers.com/mobile-vr/oculus-quest https://forum.xda-developers.com/mobile-vr/oculus-quest
vlovich123 6y ago
Ping me at my HN username at gmail with your resume and I can forward it to oculus recruiters.

ghostpepper 6y ago

Why do you think the bulk of the Oculus innovation is deep in the stack? Is there much custom hardware in the Quest 2 or is it similar to a phone in a different form factor? How much of the accuracy of the sensor fusion algorithm comes from the inherent accuracy/calibration of the underlying sensors? Has anyone tried bringing up a stock android distribution on the Quest 2?

someperson 6y ago
John Carmack does several hour-long sessions at every annual Oculus Connect event (now called Facebook Connect). [1] [2] He has often spoken about deeply optimizing virtual reality by peeling back all the software layers. From his annoyance at the Android's process scheduling on the GearVR to writing custom microcode for the Qualcomm chip's Digital Signal Processor to try and optimize playing PC games (over Oculus Link streaming) by encoding and transmitting video per scan line (instead of per frame). He said that up until a few months before the original Quest launched they weren't even sure whether they could get inside-out optical tracking working to sufficient quality, but that they just continued to iterate on the algorithms until it worked well. It's clear that most of Oculus' innovation are deep in the stack, seemingly pushed forward by the legendary John Carmack. Now that Carmack is merely the "consulting CTO" rather than working on these problems full-time there's real questions about whether Oculus' deep stack innovations will continue. Oculus Quest is effectively a smartphone in many key ways, but it has several monochrome wide-angle cameras for tracking. Also unlike smartphones it has active cooling fans for improved thermals. It seems there's a million little things than come together to make Oculus Quest standalone VR way better than any phone-holder based virtual reality platform that I've used. As far as an open-source custom firmware for Oculus Quest goes, I am unaware of any project that has yet cracked the bootloader to run unsigned code and then booted stock Android. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMIDaomx0GA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMIDaomx0GA [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXmY26pOE-Y
- brundolf 6y ago
  Inside-out tracking works perfectly well in the Windows Mixed Reality headsets too. It's not insurmountable.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

kruczek 6y ago

> At this point it's clear that Facebook have "won" VR. Eh, it doesn't look clear at all to me. It looks like its main advantage is slightly higher resolution than Valve Index and wirelessness. On the other hand from what I read Quest 2 only now will finally get 90Hz - this is what even old Vive provided. And Index goes beyond that - up to 120 and 144Hz. Also I wonder how Quest's screen quality compares to Index, besides resolution and refresh rate - couldn't find any information about Quest's field of view, pixel persistence or fill factor. And with Facebook behind Quest, I consider Index to be cheaper - I'll take $999 any day over $299 + my data. I'd say it's hardly a clear "win".

kbenson 6y ago
> And with Facebook behind Quest, I consider Index to be cheaper - I'll take $999 any day over $299 + my data. All that really means is you have enough disposable income that it's actually a decision worth even considering. For most people it's aimed at that's not the case. This isn't Gmail for free vs some paid service for $5/mo, this is more than three times the cost for something that already costs multiple hundreds of dollars.
- kruczek 6y ago
  I'd say all it means is I value my data above $700, which I understand is not the case with many people. If I would not have enough disposable income, then I wouldn't buy Index nor Quest.
  - monsieurbanana 6y ago
    Your comment was about whether facebook "won" the VR segment, not whether facebook won over you specifically. I'm sure many people in hackernews value their privacy above $700, me included, but that's clearly not the point here. We're just a blip in facebook's radar.
    - OJFord 6y ago
      A squawked and ident'ed blip, linked to a/s/l and ML estimates of personal data self valuation and price sensitivity on VR headsets.

z3phyr 6y ago

I am into FreeBSD device drivers, but I would love to help out! Ping me.

moron4hire 6y ago

Putting aside the software for a second... I've thought a little on this as well, from time to time. Hardware-wise, I don't see how the Quest 1/Lenovo Mirage Solo/Vive Focus were anything much more than Qualcomm's reference design headset (https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/snapdragon-835-vr-development-kit https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/snapdragon-835-vr-de...). Different strap designs, minor variations on display modules, removing ancillary stuff like the cellular radio and GPS, but otherwise the same CPU, same GPU, largely the same cameras. With the Quest 2 running the Snapdragon XR2, a lot of the basic features of 6-DOF VR, with controllers/passthrough/voice control/etc, could be running straight on chip. (https://www.thundercomm.com/app_en/product/1584417287281447 https://www.thundercomm.com/app_en/product/1584417287281447) Qualcomm provides an SDK for VR on their hardware that touts all the things Facebook has always claimed were their own big innovations, like asynchronous time warp and lens corrections (https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/snapdragon-vr-sdk https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/snapdragon-vr-sdk) I can't find the link right now, but Qualcomm/Thundercomm are also providing a base Android image specifically for use in VR. Which is probably why you can build and install regular ol' Android APKs on all of these headsets and they map the controller to mouse actions. My point is, I am starting to doubt Facebook has all that much "special sauce". I think it's mostly just marketing. I think Qualcomm has done the hard work here and is happy to let other companies take the credit because Qualcomm is about chip licenses, not consumer electronics. Other than tuning parameters for camera positions, there should be no reason why the OS image for any one of these headsets to run on any other one. I think it's doable. I think you could probably root the firmware and get an open source OS running on any one of these headsets. And it'd also breath new life into systems whose creators basically got bored with not making a billion dollars overnight.

cubano 6y ago
I would tend to agree with you, but is's John Carmack leading the software group for it and I just cannot believe that he hasn't done a bunch of optimizations and other work. It would just negate a reputation that he has worked his ass off his entire life to build if he hasn't done valuable targeted work on the visuals of the device.
- 6y ago

raxxorrax 6y ago

> The original Oculus Quest is already really good, and was constantly sold out I accidentally bought one until I realized the mistake and bought a rift S a day after that. Want to buy it? It is as good as new. Thought about selling it on ebay but got a bad conscience to sell it to some kid, even for a good price. Jokes aside I think not needing to connect a PC has to be the future, but I would expect the device to be able to run a conventional OS. Currently I think it will stay a dream however. Otherwise VR devices have amazing capabilities already. A few more pixels would be good, but you will quickly need a lot of processing power.

Mindwipe 6y ago
> Jokes aside I think not needing to connect a PC has to be the future, but I would expect the device to be able to run a conventional OS. Why, given the opposite has proven true in the mobile space? I wish they did, but consumers clearly do not value this.