I had the Oculus quest DK2 before oculus was bought by Facebook and enjoyed playing whatever people made, but the more Facebook locked everything down the less interested I became in VR.
Now you can’t even play with a quest unless you have a Facebook account, and it seems so easy to get locked out of your account on purpose or accidentally.
Are there unlocked VR headsets that I can just have fun with instead of being locked into one company and their products?
Thanks
The current version of “meta” account is just reverted back to an Oculus account but renamed. It has the same functionality it used to when it was called an Oculus account. And specifically is missing all the functionality of a facebook account. You can optionally also have a facebook account connected to it if you want the social features, but you don’t need them.
As far as I know there are no headsets that don’t require an account, as buying games is entirely digital now. The account is how they know what games you have purchased. The only reason to not have an account is if they want to attract users that want to sideload games only and not get them from a store. There isn’t much incentive on their end to provide that experience, especially since all the other headsets they are competing with are using the “game console” model, of selling the hardware at a loss, and making it up with software sales. Trying to be the one company that has to profit off the hardware sales too makes your headset look like a bad idea to buy. Even if some people would want that, the VR market isn’t big enough yet for that to be a viable option. Too many people are just looking for the cheapest up front purchase, no matter what they have to sign to get that price.
Maybe 5-10 years from now it would be worth doing, but it’s hard to say for sure if it ever will be. Imagine trying to launch a new console now that was similarly powerful to the current consoles, but costed 50% more. The upside being that it could run the games of both (somehow legally). That console may sound like a good idea to some of us, but how many? Enough? Probably not. Even selling hardware for profit doesn’t mean profit from day 1, you need to sell enough to cover research, development, and manufacturing. Not to mention the salaries of all your employees. So, they might need to sell a million units before they are out of the hole.
Edit: there are VR headsets that are basically just monitors. You probably don’t need an account for some of those. But they also are pretty limited in usefulness.
For me the important part is that the headset doesn’t require a specific account. As long as I can use it with multiple ecosystems there isn’t a singular point of failure, for example if the manufacturer stops supporting it.
Thanks for the detailed answer.
What kind of VR headsets are basically monitors?
I don’t even know about those, that was basically what I was using with the dk2, so I’d be pretty comfortable with that.
My main reticence over having an account for a headset is that you can be locked out of the account and then your headset becomes useless.
I remember that happening to a lot of quest users and since I’ve been looking it up since I opened this post, there are plenty more of those stories still going around, being locked out of their account and not being able to use their quest.
Being locked out only happened when it was a facebook account, that was the whole reason they went back to Oculus accounts. People would do dumb stuff on facebook and get banned, not knowing they would lose their games from that too. And despite the accounts being linked, they were still handled by two different departments, with poorly trained staff. You’d occasionally get someone that could restore your purchases, but the vast majority didn’t know how and passed the buck and blamed the other team.
It was just a huge unnecessary headache. It doesn’t happen anymore. You can be a huge jerk all you like on the internet and it won’t cost your games anymore, it’ll just cost what it normally costs.
As for headsets that work like monitors, it would be the ones that have HDMI or Display Port, ideally display port at this point as the res and framerate is getting up there and display port is more likely to be up to date on your hardware. They don’t have their own games and can’t be used wirelessly, but they should work for pcvr still.
https://youtu.be/ANjVcI6s2NA
This one seems to be one of the more popular options, but it also kinda sounds like it sucks. But, no account needed apparently. Not sure the value is worth the cost.
Oh, I do like that, thanks, that was a good and informative video, I’m going to see what else is in that sort of vein.
That’s also great to know about the Oculus accounts, there are still a bunch of complaints about the quest 3 being locked out or unresponsive, but I see they’re more about technical issues rather than being locked out of the account.
I remember when they used to use the Facebook accounts and I couldn’t believe it. When people said that they were locked away from the console that they bought, that was just insane to me.
Thank you very much.
If you really don’t want to be tied to any accounts, buying something like an HTC vive 2nd hand and setting it up on a linux computer using Envision is probably the most libre VR setup you can reasonably get that is both capable and affordable. Keep in mind the HTC vive is from 2016 so the screens and optics are not great but the 2nd hand cost should reflect that. The only account you will need if you want a good experience will be a Steam account since Envision borrows a driver from SteamVR to work, though once you have done that you could just log out. LVRA is a great source of info for this stuff.
Okay, cool. Thanks.
I’m going to dig into that site, there is way more to this question than I thought there was haha.