[PerkinWarwick]

The Facebook angle to this sounds absolutely heinous, but just what have they done to lock the headset to Facebook? Is there some kind of secret handshake/encryption going on?

If someone from the Evil Empire was here, it would be interesting to get some notion how Facebook checks identity. Is there some huge glom of software that compares online activity, public records, phone records, bank records, credit records, etc. to make sure you're an OK person?

[soylentcola]

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.

[Tepix]

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.

[PerkinWarwick]

The underlying question is 'what would it take to break the device free'.

[volta83]

Can't answer that question, but suppose you break it free, then what ?

It would be like maintaining a separate appstore for iPhones.

[soylentcola]

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.

[PerkinWarwick]

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.

[idontwantthis]

It's available on Vive Focus 3, the only other comparable standalone headset widely available in the US market that I'm aware of.

FB is just way ahead of the field on standalone. Once everyone else catches up I'll be surprised if Immersed doesn't port to each of them.