But you can plug the Quest into a PC and use it as a PCVR headset. Oculus sells a 16 ft fiber optic cable for $80, but it works well over any good quality USB 3 cable (and even works over USB 2 now).

The downside of this is that it's more front heavy than a PC headset without all the standalone guts, and I'm sure there's non-zero latency for running the video stream over a USB connection rather than a standard video cable. It works pretty well though, I think the trade-offs are absolutely worth the benefits of having a standalone headset.

The version on the Oculus Store doesn't do SteamVR streaming though, you have to buy it and then sideload an alternate version (which still checks for a license from the store).

There's supposed to be some sort of easier sideloading system coming (currently you need to sign up for a developer account and enable developer mode), but no new info since that was announced a few months ago.

Pixel density isn't as high as what you'll get on a real monitor, but having lots of them ought to help make up for it.

Carmack brought this up in his talk last night, apparently with the higher pixel count in the Quest 2 the quality is now limited by the fresnel lens optics, and they won't be able to just keep bumping the pixel count up to improve visuals. So it's not clear what the path is to higher quality VR is for them. People have made headsets with more exotic multi-element glass optical setups, but there are trade-offs for cost, weight, and likelihood of things breaking if you knock it off a table.

https://github.com/JackD83/ALVR

Also, there is a good amount of compression involved so the graphical fidelity takes a massive hit.

They claim that they are going to be improving both of these issues, but given that they still exist in largely the same state as they did with the Oculus Link Beta with the V1 Quest, people should be skeptical about how much improvement they are going to be able to accomplish. Carmack talked about some ideas on how it can be made better, but I don't know if he's still assisting them with anything at all.

I'm very happy with my v1 Quest, but its PC support has some significant drawbacks.

He also mentioned he hopes they can eventually get an official wireless solution out to the public.

So now you're tethered, your tether is more fragile, and you have significant extra latency.

Standalone headsets are so much more convenient, and are affordable to people without a high powered gaming computer, so I see why Facebook is going in this direction.

>We’re going to focus on standalone VR headsets moving forward. We’ll no longer pursue PC-only hardware, with sales of Rift S ending in 2021. That said, the Rift Platform isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we've seen significant growth in PC VR via Oculus Link, and the Rift Platform will continue to grow while offering high-end PC VR experiences.

So, yeah. End of the road for the Rift. Oculus Link makes it redundant.

https://www.oculus.com/blog/play-rift-content-on-quest-with-...

Tethering just feels like an bootstrapping niche. Appealing to those who already find gaming PCs appealing, obviously dovetailing with highly engaged gamers. But, tethering is never going to "win." Tethering for power makes current battery life OK, even the quest 1 is good enough.

Mass adoption, almost certainly, means an affordable all-in-one unit. We have enough history at this point (with home gaming) to know what the price range is. Oculus have been playing within that range.

Graphics/power is already (Quest1) good enough for a lot of games. An interesting part of the history of home gaming is that both "more is never enough" and "good enough is good enough" seem to be true. Lots of the most popular gaming products (games, consoles.. eg minecraft) did not push boundaries at all. OTOH, bleeding edge has always been highly relevant, especially for blockbuster games.

On balance, I don't think graphics is a (commercially) limiting factor for VR anymore. This makes a rift/tethered device kind of questionable. If it doesn't get mass adoption, and I don't think it can), it can't support the high end games that really need these graphics. The oculus product line strategy (whether accidentally or deliberately) seems clever. The rift is what you develop new games for. They will (hopefully) be portable to the next gen Quest.

Overall, I think the current game is all about weight/comfort and content. The current devices are heavy & sweaty. This one weighs just 10% less. Every gram counts, but I don't think this is a breakthrough. Content is the other factor. IMO, exercise apps still need to breakthrough. I'm surprised ankle controllers and heart rate monitors aren't a thing yet. I really think the right game & controllers with the current gen quest could become a breakthrough workout thing. A lot of current games are pretty physical, but I suspect you can get to a point where a 6 week game addiction makes you look visibly fitter... on par with a daily gym routine.

It’s clearly dead and as someone who owned one it’s been clear FB hasn’t cared about it for some time.

They get the ability to target ads against people who match some characteristics. Facebook's business is literally built on advertisers inability to access that data. If they had access, advertisers would advertise elsewhere and Facebook wouldn't get a cut.

So while protection of privacy is always also the right of one individual, I think it is crucial to realize that this kind of power over "the masses" isn't something any free society could afford in the long term on a systemic level. If we look at a democracy with it's separation of powers, it's institutions etc as a delicately balanced electronic circuit — which has the ability to self correct — players like Facebook are like the introduction of new feedback paths that work better for people who don't mind to sell their soul when abusing them. Of course such new connections will have an effect on the whole system, but the crucial point is, that nobody really considered what this effect might be and whether what we have and like in democracy can actually survive this.

You cannot have free elections if the people voting in it are put into their own matrix-esque simulation of reality. How could we ever find agreeable consent if our realities have no common overlap by design?

I think a lot of people in tech sphere don't really want to see this as they are profiting from this. It makes us powerful wizards who see more and understand more than others.

Here's the media championing it:

"How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection"

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-...

"How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters."

https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obama...

"Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election"

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...

"the firm never tried to stop them when they realized what was doing, and even told them they'd made a special exception for them"

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campa...

"Why are politicians now freaking out about a feature that has been publicly documented since its inception and that was discontinued three years ago?"

https://reason.com/2018/03/23/cambridge-analytics-dust-up-re...

Not spreading the boogeyman of 'they sell your data' will improve discourse on how to actually change things.

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-zyngas-depend...

I worked on VR over 30 years ago. I am so happy to finally see great consumer VR gear.

C'mon, I get the hate but this is worst than tinfoil hat conspiracies.

Most of my games are bought on Steam, not on the Oculus store.

You could think of Oculus as an effort to increase the amount of user attention inventory Facebook has in supply to rent out to advertisers. Also, they are positioning themselves as an intermediary for transactions in the future VR economy by being platform owner (a la Apple owning the App Store). My guess is the long-term plan is to make money here by displaying ads in VR and by getting a cut of goods and services sold though VR (see: Ready Player One).

They spent like 15 minutes of the presentation talking about how ethical they're going to be (re: AR glasses) and how trust has to be earned, but their ethics track record isn't exactly stellar.

You mean being part of the many billion dollar game industry by controlling the highest growth sector in that industry with vendor lock in and rent seeking for any game sold in that new market?

Yeah...who would want that...

I don't _think_ Facebook had a lot of computer vision expertise at the time and it makes sense they'd want to buy into that.

Amazon was a choice I guess?

Google (with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo) and Microsoft (with Hololens) had stand alone headsets before the Quest.

Again, why would FB want be the company that does that?

I kind of doubt we have anything to worry about now, but there is a terrifying future on the horizon where everything you look at, everything you do, is measured and any value is extracted and sent to ~~our new overlords~~ FB.

AR will be all about the ads as facebook can serve them everywhere you go. That's where they will make $100BN in ad revenue.

They are currently piggybacking on top of either android or ios. Which means they are at the whim of other powers.

With a platform they are much more in control, and able to tap into a much bigger revenue stream.

Facebook might just be trying to get ahead of the game, betting that the next step past phones is VR/AR.

within FB people 'assume good intention'.

outside FB not so much.

think about why

First it measures your fitness level. Those devices have high quality acceleration and gyroscope sensors. They could know your visual and acoustic acuity.

They measure what games you play, for how long, at what time.

With these data and processing done by AI created by engineers they can extract and know more about yourself than you do.

We know from Snowden that places like the NSA collect and save data expecting technological changes in 5-10 years in the future for processing that data. The technology for processing does not need to be ready yet.

This is extremely useful for Advertisers and secret services. This is not what you say you are, this is what you are.

"raw" VR data is about 10 megabytes a second of black and white infrared video.

plus audio and position data of either controllers or hands.

After its been processed it can give you a sparse pointcloud of your living room (which is not overly bad) but thats not something thats done by facebook, yet. With a bit more work you could get a dense pointcloud.

Unlike AR which will need a bunch more processing on device to get position and geo data, VR is mostly just slam

Facebook generated $29 per user in the US last year. A small bit of extra info about people's gaming habits is not going to improve ad targetting enough to make up for a $100 gap in price.

But it's clear from the reviews the $100 was mainly achieved by cost-cutting.

They may still lose some money on it but that's just an investment in becoming market leader in VR.

all the games we've bought produce accurate and targeted profile that allow facebook to recommend new games with a high degree of accuracy.

But I do agree that it seems like a killer value - I'll probably preorder one!

There's multi-frame latency and compression artifacts involved in this. It's really disingenuous to say that a Quest 2 is unambiguously better than an actual PC VR headset