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Oculus will allow sideloading and rooting to avoid e-waste
- Longhanks 5y agoTo further avoid e-waste, I will avoid Oculus (or anything else Facebook).
- throwaway1777 5y agoOculus hardware is quite good for the price, and since you can root it and sideload the Facebook point is moot now.
- canada_dry 5y agoCall me crazy, but another shoe's gotta drop i.e. Oculus will practically brick the device if it's rooted - disallowing some new must-have features due to "security concerns".
- micromacrofoot 5y agoWhich games can you sideload?
- mrgordon 5y agoYou can root it and sideload on their end of life devices. Not exactly what most people are trying to buy new.
- dang 5y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments to HN. Maybe you don't owe Facebook better but you owe this community better if you're posting to it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- interestica 5y agoSpecifically for the Oculus Go.
- tombert 5y agoIt wouldn't surprise me if this leads to future versions of the Oculus being open-sourced. IIRC, Carmack was the one who really pushed for the Doom and Quake engines to be opened up.
- gfodor 5y agoI very much doubt this will happen except if Carmack stays on and pushes hard for it. He's already got one foot out the door, and I suspect he's spent a lot of political capital on this one, which is for a headset that they've already determined was a dead-end form factor so at relatively low cost vs if they were to do this for Quest 1 in a year or two.
- tombert 5y agoWhat makes you say that he has one foot out the door? I'm not arguing, I just don't follow Oculus news very much.
- loeg 5y ago(Which is the old-old generation hardware -- the Quest and Quest 2 succeed it.)
- MonadIsPronad 5y agoHow do we get this made into law, this unlocking of EOL hardware...
- caslon 5y agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647316 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28647316 But also, seriously, they already allow sideloading on literally every device they've ever put out. They don't stop you from using adb. Rooting is cool and new to the platform, and so are alternate operating systems! But sideloading onto them isn't new.
- cma 5y agoThe existing sideloading, other than on PC desktop, was only for developers (no cost, but you had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and more). Other than the lack of cost it was more similar to Apple's limited developer sideloading than it was to sideloading on Android for mobile. This is actual consumer sideloading and root on the device.
- numpad0 5y agoNot before activating the device and allowing sideload with a non-frozen account.
- dougmwne 5y agoThis is for the Go. It's a great initiative to unlock the device at EOL. I would prefer it to be unlocked by law at purchase, but understand that often the cost has been heavily subsidized by the lock-in and mandating an unlock by law would result in higher prices. For instance, there is a business version of the Quest that is not tied to a FB account, but is twice the price.
- teawrecks 5y agoWould gladly pay it. Which is why I have an index.
- willvarfar 5y agoThis has parallels with how iD always open sourced their previous generation game engines. John Carmack was behind that too (https://youtu.be/iYk4Y5a6qmI https://youtu.be/iYk4Y5a6qmI interview about it). It’s really good to see an engineer and leader who thinks of the greater good and what follows.
- InitialLastName 5y ago> It’s really good to see an engineer and leader who thinks of the greater good and what follows. There's something incongruous about "thinks of the greater good" and "designs tools that are unquestionably being used to further his employer's mass surveillance mission" being applied to the same person.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- sneak 5y agoCarmack is smart enough to know that the greater good involves not working for an ad surveillance company.
- waleedamer 5y agoDoes anyone even use the Go? I'm a full time VR developer and I haven't heard of the Go in over a year. Still great to see this kind of move coming from Facebook though. Here's hoping for the same initiative for the Quest 2
- ngokevin 5y agoIt's a win-win play for them. Gain a small piece of developer goodwill by opening up an obsolete headset they don't care about anyways, like open sourcing a dead project. We will hope they will do the same for the Quest, but they'll only ever do it for obsolete models.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoYeah the Go is simply no better than a $5 google cardboard setup. Nice for a once off trick. At work we use some of these with some stupid training app that is more about showing off than actual training. It's designed to pretend we're a hip and modern company while the user clicks through a few popups on a 360 degree photo slideshow. As someone who's trying to push real VR this really hurts my efforts. When I try to introduce something like Arthur Digital for real interactive VR meetings people are like "oh yeah I saw that VR thing during training, it was cool but useless". They think they've seen all VR can offer. And it's making people sick with imperfect tracking (try leaning forward to look at something...) 3DOF / Cardboard style VR should die. It's holding back the industry now.
- thih9 5y agoGood news; but it’s hard to trust Facebook at this point. - They already demonstrated user hostile approach with the mandatory FB accounts. - People might use sideloading/rooting to reduce tracking and ads; long term I believe FB will want to fight that.
- Karunamon 5y agoI don't think people out of the HN/tech bubble find FB accounts to be particularly hostile, and the number of people who will go through the rooting/sideloading process necessary for either of those two things is statistically nonexistent.
- zapt02 5y agoIt will probably only be available for EOL devices.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoThat's ok though, it makes keeping my old Quest 1 a lot more interesting than flogging it on ebay for a hundred bucks. It's still a pretty capable device with a beautiful oled screen that's looking to be abandoned soon (now that games like resident evil are coming out that are quest 2 only).
- ParanoidShroom 5y agoIsn't this the same with Android phones and google accounts? Or iphones and icloud accounts? Like android had custom roms without google, i guess this open the path to roms without fb? I think no can disagree that this is at least a step in the right direction
- GekkePrutser 5y agoOn an Android phone you don't have to sign in with a Google account. I do this on my OnePlus, I install apps through F-Droid and Aurora store to try to preserve some shred of privacy while not being too feature limited. In particular google push messages still work. I also kick unwanted system apps off with ADB. It's a compromise compared to a really clean ROM but it's possible. It's not possible to use a Quest without an account.
- Ms-J 5y agoTo encourage the advancement of FOSS software, we should work to make the practice of selling only unlocked devices codified into law.
- tobr 5y agoThis is an aside but not really since we’re discussing a representative of a disgraceful social media platform who’s posting on a different disgraceful social media platform: I can’t even look at a Twitter user’s profile now without being logged in to an account? What a disgrace.
- Robotbeat 5y agoUse In Cognito mode (or equivalent).
- LegitShady 5y agotwitter is inadvertently doing you a huge favour. Twitter is telling you to stop paying attention to twitter, which is really for the best.
- ronsor 5y agoI concur. This change cut my Twitter usage from ~5-10 minutes per day to roughly 0 minutes per day.
- cosmojg 5y agoIt's not mentioned in the linked tweet, but does anyone here know whether they have plans to do something similar with the Rift/CV1?
- kgwxd 5y agoMy 5 year old really wants a VR set. Oculus is not an option. Are there other VR headsets that are either standalone or PC driven that would be good for that age group?
- MikusR 5y agoNo
- Firehawke 5y agoI wouldn't recommend VR for anyone under 12-13 or so. Eyes are still developing at that age and there's a possible chance of screwing up focus with extended VR use.
- xxpor 5y agoHas this actually been proven or is it like the old wives tale that sitting too close to the tv will do the same thing?
- numpad0 5y agoOld wives’ tale, but considering there are few basically unsubstantiated claims that VR magically fixed some crossed eyes and nearsightedness, it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to be cautions about children's futures. Something like that.
- judge2020 5y agoi feel like more research is necessary into potential links between VR use and any optical complications before we can assume this to be true.
- tacLog 5y agoI have never heard of this before do you have any sources or data points? From a quick google it seems to be a warning that Sony is at least putting on their VR offering. This source says otherwise: "ophthalmologists agree there is no reason to be concerned that VR headsets will damage eye development, health or function." https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/are-virtual-reality-headsets-safe-eyes https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/are-virtual-r... It seems like there is just a lack of data regarding the impact of VR usage on eye development and as a result people are being rightful cautious.
- awinter-py 5y agohmm the top reply is 'what about the quest' and JC is like > I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect. 'old hardware supports OSS, new hardware doesn't' feels like a medium win for the repair movement but still not the world I want to live in we should pass laws so hardware vendors can't be the sole OS vendor on their platform
- bombcar 5y ago>I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect. This is one of those things that if you start with it as a goal, it is relatively easy, but if you want to ADD it later, can be insanely difficult - or impossible.
- a-dub 5y agonice!
- PaulHoule 5y ago"I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect."
- GekkePrutser 5y agoIn fact this is exactly what I expected at FaceBook. What I didn't expect is that he managed to pull this off at all. Wow! And well done.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- micromacrofoot 5y agoIsn't this only being applied to a single EOL device? You might get a few tinkerers but 99% of these are still going to hit the landfill without software support. People aren't exactly clamoring for 5 year old Android devices, for example.
- georgewsinger 5y agoHaving root access to your VR device is cool, but having full, open source access to your VR device is even cooler :] www.simulavr.com