[citrusybread]

can we really call it standalone if you need it to phone home to Meta? and doesn't it require an account one of their services too?

they did a fantastic job with hardware. I just wish they didn't couple the software so tightly.

[TulliusCicero]

> can we really call it standalone if you need it to phone home to Meta?

Yes.

[ipaddr]

This doesn't work anywhere without internet service. Standalone it is not.

[beardbound]

For what it's worth it does require a meta account, but not a Facebook one. I refused to buy one while it required a Facebook account since I deleted a couple of years ago. Once they made the change I figured that was an OK compromise. I just found out today during the outage that my headset won't work if I get signed out of my Meta account. That was an unpleasant realization, although I suppose it's partially my fault for trusting Meta not to hamstring the hardware their selling.

It's the equivalent of finding out that if Microsoft's auth servers go down no one with a Windows PC can use it since they can't authenticate. I'm fairly displeased.

[bonton89]

I know they raised the price recently but it seemed pretty obvious to me they were selling these at a loss to try and get people locked in by the software.

[ben_w]

> can we really call it standalone if you need it to phone home to Meta?

Yes, because etymologically it's "standalone" vs. "wired"; this is akin to how phones are "mobile" vs. (when I was a kid) "landline".

[TulliusCicero]

Nitpick: strictly speaking it's standalone vs tethered (which is usually wired, but could be wireless).

[oven9342]

I wonder how many people are secretly boycotting the product because of the prison Reputation of the maker

[TulliusCicero]

Oh there are definitely people who avoid it because it's made by Meta. Maybe a bunch. On the other hand, it seems to be the most popular VR headset line by a wide margin.

It would be cool if Valve came out with a standalone headset, they're one of the few companies I can see that would be in a good position to do that: they already have a good amount of VR experience with one high-end headset + SteamVR APIs + a couple VR games, they have their own highly popular store/platform, they generally have a positive reputation with gamers, and they have a decent amount of hardware experience in general including the recent Steam Deck for mobile gaming hardware specifically.

And of course, a Valve headset would probably be significantly more open than the Quest. The Steam Deck has gotten some good reputation among more FOSS/hacker-oriented people for being fairly open: you can use it in a regular Linux desktop mode, you can install Windows (or presumably other OSes) on it, it's fairly repairable, etc. The default behavior is very console-like, but it's not very locked down if you don't want it to be. Best of both worlds, really.

[docmars]

It makes me wonder how the world would be if monitor manufacturers did the same thing, it would be unacceptable.

I view VR headsets and their peripherals as no different than a mouse, keyboard, and display.

Companies requiring all this nonsense to use your device, put in that light, is ludacris.

[TulliusCicero]

A silly comparison. A standalone VR headset is more comparable to a smartphone or game console than a monitor or keyboard. The latter have little to no compute.

[agar]

> I view VR headsets and their peripherals as no different than a mouse, keyboard, and display

That could be valid when VR headsets were tethered to a PC via a DisplayPort or HDMI connection and essentially mirrored the display.

The Quest is closer to an iPhone or Android phone or an all-digital handheld gaming device. With integrated compute, display, battery, text input, pointing devices, mic, and speakers, it bears little functional resemblance to peripherals like a mouse, keyboard, or display with no utility unless slaved to another device.

Considering I can use my Quest with no wifi or other network to log in (once initial set up is complete), it seems that the Meta back-end APIs must have broke in some way that confused the headsets into thinking they were available when they weren't.

[hyuuu]

comparing it with a monitor is rather unfair, you have to bundle the computing along with it, not to mention the applications to make it an actually fair comparison. At that point, is it still ludacris?