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A comment on What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week. Parent comment

Re:What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week by soylentcola on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @10:47AM (#28683459)
As a device that's essentially a smartphone with some extra hardware/custom software, I would imagine that's like asking "what has Apple done to lock the iPhone to iOS?" or "what has Sony done to lock the Playstation to only run Playstation software?"

If you think of it less like a monitor and more like a game console or a phone with a locked bootloader, then it's easy to see how you can require account auth in order to use the built-in software.

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Re:What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week by Tepix on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @04:40PM (#28687215)
Just look at the privacy policy of Facebook with regards to Virtual Reality devices and you'll see that they want it all. It's well documented.

No thanks.

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Re:What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week by PerkinWarwick on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @11:02AM (#28683607)
The underlying question is 'what would it take to break the device free'.
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Re:What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week by volta83 on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @12:59PM (#28684951)
Can't answer that question, but suppose you break it free, then what ?

It would be like maintaining a separate appstore for iPhones.

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Re:What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week by soylentcola on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @01:38PM (#28685358)
I recall that being the case when I had an old gen2 iPad and wanted to do a few things that weren't sanctioned/supported by Apple. There were a few well-known repos for homebrew software and that's where I got the handful of useful tweaks and customizations for that (jailbroken) tablet.

I guess the issue there is that the popularity of the platform and nature of its limitations made it worth someone's trouble to maintain those repos. With something like an Oculus, I don't know that there are enough users (and also a sufficient subset that want to avoid Facebook or run some unsanctioned software) to justify the effort.

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Re:What it's like to spend 40-50 hours in VR every week by PerkinWarwick on Tuesday September 28, 2021 @03:06PM (#28686220)
Perhaps as a hobbyist device, there's certainly a lot of interesting apps that could be written.

I'm assuming here that it is somehow subsidized (via volume or via data mining) and is cheaper than alternatives.

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