[superkuh]

They broke the emerging VR software ecosystem into the open side which many companies supported and a Facebook only proprietary one they asserted ownership and control of. Before Facebook bought Oculus there was cooperation and native software interoptibility between Vive and Rift.

Then they stopped supporting desktop head mounted displays for the most part and switched to building face mounted VR computers that happened to have an initially janky, and always higher latency, passthrough mode to support acting as a display for a real computer.

[LordDragonfang]

>They broke the emerging VR software ecosystem into the open side which many companies supported and a Facebook only proprietary one

What? There used to be a bunch of different VR platforms, and only recently has the industry settled on a single open standard, OpenXR[1], and Facebook was (or at least claims to be[2]) one of the major contributors to that open standard.

There are a lot of things you can criticize Meta for doing with Oculus, but opposing open standards isn't one of them.

[1] https://www.khronos.org/openxr/

[2] https://developer.oculus.com/blog/openxr-for-oculus/

[marrone12]

The second point doesn't make sense at all. Consumers vastly prefer standalone VR, and it was always the future.

For the first point, I'll give you that they prefer playing on their own platform. But they haven't "broken" anything. While yes you do need a software layer, e.g. Revive, you can still play steam games on oculus and oculus games on an index. And you have no idea whether that would have happened anyway as one of these companies got bigger.

Google used to say "do no evil" and now they don't, and they didn't get acquired before they changed. These things just happen.

[camdat]

>Before Facebook bought Oculus there was cooperation and native software interoptibility between Vive and Rift.

With respect, did you ever use a Vive or a Rift CV1? They absolutely had much worst interoperability prior to FB. The launch of CV2 gated it behind the Oculus store, making it impossible to use Steam with the CV2 before overwhelming negative feedback changed it.

[JoshTriplett]

This has been what I've found frustrating about most past VR headsets or attempts to build one: I don't want a VR headset to be like a phone or laptop and have its own computer and app ecosystem; I want a peripheral that attaches to my phone and laptop.

[filoleg]

You can connect any oculus quest device to your desktop and use it just like Vive with steamvr aka peripheral. It is an officially supported functionality. They didnt remove it by creating Quest, they just added standalone mode in addition to the "peripheral" mode.

[camdat]

If anything FB has greatly improved this. Airlink is a literal step-change improvement to VR that allows the user to have a totally wireless PC VR experience, something that was assumed to be very difficult/impossible over existing wireless standards.

[WrtCdEvrydy]

but you can't create lock-in and an app store out of that.