But did Facebook add any value (i.e. engineering money/hours) to improve the device? What you've listed are all negatives, but there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.
But at the same time, for any new users who value their own privacy the device is now pretty useless, and for any existing users who value their privacy but also want to be up-to-date and get new features, they're also probably going to be locked out in future updates.
So you kind of have to excuse them for focusing on the negatives, because they don't get to enjoy the positives. It's kind of a moot point for them what Facebook brought to the table.
This is always the concern with these kinds of purchases, and I think this was a big part of the concern back in 2014. I was never worried that Facebook wouldn't invest in Oculus, as a consumer I was worried that it would ruin the Oculus ecosystem and shove dystopian adware onto the devices.
The vast majority of those users likely also have a Facebook, Instagram, and/or Whatsapp account.
Without Facebook's funding, none of the recent advancements are likely to exist in the first place. Valve hasn't done it, HTC hasn't done it, Sony hasn't done it. Because it is hard, expensive, and a money losing endeavor (for the forseeable future).
To be clear, I am strongly against the requirement, but am glad the product exists.
I'm not saying there aren't positives, I'm saying that it's understandable why users who now need to choose between a peripheral and their privacy are having a hard time focusing on those positives.
I'm also not too cynical about the market, because thankfully there are multiple companies in this space who are making progress. So Facebook will trash Oculus and things will stink for a while.
Eventually somebody else will come along and offer the same functionality without feeling the need to create a user-hostile platform out of a peripheral. Eventually the Linux support will improve. Eventually some community group will take over WebVR and we'll get a general platform instead of a bunch of separate stores designed to increase user lock-in. Eventually the games will be disassociated from the peripherals. Eventually, we'll get what we want and the space will improve. And Facebook's early efforts to improve the raw tech will be a part of that story.
But in the meantime, for the people who were predicting what Facebook was going to do from the moment Oculus was acquired -- I think it's reasonable to step back and let them say, "we told you so."
Without Facebook's capital and Zuckerberg's commitment to VR, I doubt the Quest would exist. That project was announced in 2016 and was likely in development for a couple of years before that. Still it took until mid-2019 to be released to the public. IIRC, Carmack said that development on the Go was started after the Quest, yet the Go went to market a year sooner. I can only imagine what kind of hell it was to get a 2016 phone SoC to do VR with 6DOF inside-out tracking.
Lenovo did it before the Go released (or about the same). It was kind of gimped because they went with the Daydream controller instead of full controllers but the headset itself was roomscale VR. It was also bigger and not as comfortable but worked on a previous gen SOC to the Quest. Check out the Lenovo Mirage Solo.
Since it only had two front-facing cameras, the Mirage Solo would have required extra hardware to track any controllers. Also I don't think there was ever an app for it that let you walk two steps away from the origin. The only truly room scale thing I saw was a demo written by some developers. They had to put the headset in dev mode and disable a bunch of safety mechanisms. I wonder if this limitation was imposed to minimize drift.
I developed on it and the limitation was mostly self imposed for safety/perf reasons. Its much easier to draw a consistent roomscale boundary on the Quest with the 6DOF controller. Without that its a real UX problem. Even the Quest is constantly asking to redraw the boundary. It was one of two SOC generations (as well as VR SDK gens) earlier and it was quite hard to build out a full room without a lot of perspective tricks.
It really wasn't a fundamental technical leap to go from the Mirage to a Quest. The Quest feels like a (well thought out) iteration instead of a revolution compared to the Mirage Solo.
Why do you say its the hardest part? Hand gesture tracking is quite hard, but tracking IR LEDs on a controller is much easier than tracking head motion as long as you have the camera setup to keep them in view.
This isn't correct. There were/are a lot of inside out VR headsets. Oculus just happens to have a brand, a solid marketing presence, a solid product, the appearance of longevity etc.
Facebook might have helped but from a purely technical perspective, Facebook wasn't the only path.
The Lenovo Mirage Solo had 6DOF tracking with the Daydream controller. It had an experimental 6DOF controller add on but Google killed Daydream before that shipped. Inside out PC headsets exist with the camera setup for 6DOF inside out.
Currently the Quest is the only Android based (and thus fully stand alone) headset that's wasn't Daydream branded and wasn't killed when Google mothballed their VR support. There's less now then there were, or would have been if Google stuck with it.
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My ancient CPU is actually slower corewise than a Snapdragon 835. It's embarrassingly slow, about as fast as the first i5, if that. The snapdragon 835 is almost twice as fast as it corewise, actually.
> But did Facebook add any value (i.e. engineering money/hours) to improve the device? What you've listed are all negatives, but there have to be at least a few positives to come out of it.
I don't have the financials, but I expect that after spending $2 billion for the acquisition, they didn't live them alone.
One notable thing is that Oculus hired Michael Abrash just following the announcement of the acquisition. With John Carmack, who was already there, they are among the most (if not the most) prominent developers in the field. Even though Carmack stepped down as a CTO, both are still there. I have stopped following VR news but Oculus had pretty nice prototypes a few years ago which combined eye tracking, foveated rendering and varifocal lenses, all addressing fundamental problems with the current generation of headsets.
Also, even though I am not sure about Facebook involvement, they financed some of the best VR games at the time. Lone Echo is one of them. Ready At Dawn, the developer is now part of Oculus Studio, a branch of Oculus focused on making VR content. Note that having good VR content is extremely important, even more so than the devices themselves. I mean, you are not going to spend hundreds of dollars just to slash cubes, or maybe you do, can't blame you ;)
