[fmsf]

I was considering buying the Quest 3 this morning, this outage is timely. The fact that I can't use my perfectly working headset to play an offline game because facebook is down, makes me wonder if I should go for a different provider. Any recommendations? Excluding apple vision pro since it is too expensive.

[basilgohar]

As a principle I think it is a good idea to avoid any technically unneccessary coupling of hardware or software to something else that is not strictly user-servicing, else the priorities are inverted in favor of the vendor's priorities and not your own.

[bdangubic]

I have been in the industry for the last 25 years and have done more “technically unnecessary” things than there are grains of sand on Earth :)

[waynesonfire]

why are you smiling about that?

[docmars]

Probably sarcasm because it's likely out of their control due to product & executive demands.

[auselen]

Why are you serious about that?

[nine_k]

People casually doing things that feel slightly evil is... disconcerting.

Not going to judge anyone, but also nothing to be happy about.

[zer00eyz]

There is a point where you learn that everything is some sort of moral compromise. There is always going to be someone ahead of you and someone behind, it means someone is always going to get left out.

No system changes that, or makes it better, just different.

[CobrastanJorji]

I'm pretty sure the priorities are almost always inverted these days, unnecessary coupling or not.

[TulliusCicero]

The Quest 3 is kind of the obvious mainstream consumer choice for a VR headset.

Standalone wireless headset, reasonably powerful chipset, can optionally stream from a PC either wired or wireless, good optics/resolution, decent controllers/tracking, large game library, large suite of features (including hand tracking and color passthrough), all for a reasonable price. Not sure any other headset really competes on all those things at once.

[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.

[TulliusCicero]

Not true. You can turn off the wifi and the headset works fine.

The current problems sound like a server-side bug while it phones home. But usually it can work fine without internet.

Standalone just means the VR compute is happening on the headset itself, not on a console or gaming PC the headset is tethered to. Of course, most of the people disputing "standalone" already know that, they're just playing definitional games.

[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.

[ifyoubuildit]

So compute requires vendor lock in? That seems silly to me.

Edit: Can we just acknowledge that a lot of the bells and whistles are for the companies benefit at the expense of the user? Thats their right, but it's also our right to want something better.

[TulliusCicero]

> So compute requires vendor lock in? That seems silly to me.

Correct, it's very similar to game consoles, though it is somewhat more open than those (sideloading is possible, including standard Android apps IIRC, and you can run PC VR games from other stores while tethered).

> Can we just acknowledge that a lot of the bells and whistles are for the companies benefit at the expense of the user?

It's the same model as XBox or Playstation, seems like. They sell the hardware at cost or at a loss, and make it up via software.

A fully open headset with comparable specs would probably cost much more for the hardware. From a business standpoint that would be very stupid for a company like Meta, but this is hacker news, and many commenters here see nothing wrong or silly about asking businesses to commit suicide.

[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.

[TulliusCicero]

It sounds like a server-side bug that forced a log out somehow. Which does really suck, Meta deserves criticism for that, but acting like this means the headset "isn't standalone" is silly, since that's not what "standalone" means in the context of VR headsets.

[agar]

Agree, many posts I read seem like classic "I don't like Meta/VR/big companies/social media so let me use this specific incident to confirm my biases."

As you say, there's valid criticism to be made but it's hard to find the signal through the noise.

[docmars]

I think the desire for "standalone" VR headsets to mean offline-capable is totally reasonable. It has its own storage, apps and games get installed on it directly, and none of its core features need to rely on an online connection.

[docmars]

Given that it uses its own OS, essentially, is a fair point. I guess what I meant around my monitor analogy earlier is that it has the capability to serve that purpose, possibly without the sophisticated OS that wraps the store experience, the apps/games, and other features -- specifically with being able to use it on SteamVR or your PC in general.

This makes it a device that's generally capable of using any supported source for its screens, and can pass its peripheral input to other devices, like a PC, not unlike a mouse and keyboard.

VR headsets could treat their "OS" as a minimal experience akin to an OSD on a monitor that lets you switch sources and use the peripherals more generally like a mouse/keyboard with the right drivers on the target machine.

I'm more interested in calling out that Meta missed an opportunity here, and that it's confusing that they offer some semblance of these features (wireless linking for SteamVR...) while coupling that so closely to their OS and online-only experience.

[agar]

I don't know if you'll ever see this, but thought I'd reply.

First, the original Rift headsets were as you describe: lightweight, passing through the PC VR image. However, Meta did not miss out on an opportunity. In what was perhaps the most effective A/B test they could run, they released the Rift S (tethered PCVR) and Quest 1 at effectively the same time. The market feedback was resounding: I believe it was a 10-to-1 preference for a standalone experience vs. tied to a PC. Since they doubled down on standalone (or all-in-one if you prefer), well over 20 million headsets have been sold. In fact, they're so popular that even the fraction that connects to Steam is basically tied for market share with the most popular PC VR headset ever, the Index.

Second, even as a PC VR HMD it was a real stretch to call it a monitor equivalent. It's wildly complicated to create compelling VR images. You need two screens at nearly 2Kx2K resolution each, running at 90 frames/second, sustained. Dip below that and you can induce nausea. Not every PC can do that, so you need careful engineering between the client and HMD, with tricks like time warp, space warp, interleaving, compression, prediction, pose estimation, etc. to take up the slack. Creating sub-millimeter precision of location with six degrees of freedom either requires external base stations (cost, complexity) or inside-out tracking with headset-mounted cameras and a processor running realtime simultaneous location and mapping and image recognition code, which implies a CPU and tech stack to support it. Nowadays people also expect passthrough (with real-time depth correction), hand tracking (AI routines for hand posing), and more. All this is to say that significant code must run on the HMD for a modern gaming headset (Meta's target market), as well as on the PC. And if you're investing that much in a custom software stack, you can't make it up on hardware margin - the cost to build an HMD is just too high. So you have to have an app store tie-in, because Valve sure isn't going to share its Steam profits with you.

Now, certainly there have been (and are) HMDs that tried this approach. HP (G2) and HTC (Vive series) both put out quality products leveraging the Steam ecosystem. Neither are sold in volume today, because the economics of selling a headset just aren't good enough.

Immersed and Big Screen are releasing very lightweight fixed-function HMDs for either work or movie watching that do operate the way you describe. Neither are expected to be high volume devices, and both are more expensive than Quest 3.

In short: VR is much, much harder than you may realize. Meta didn't miss an opportunity, the explicitly chose the market-tested, most popular solution that also has an economic model with some potential future payoff. If you want a "minimal experience akin to an OSD" then look at the Big Screen Beyond ($999, https://www.bigscreenvr.com/) or the Immersed Visor ($1,049, https://www.visor.com/). (Note: compare the price of these hardware-model pass-through devices to the Quest 3 ($499) which also includes a CPU, battery, storage, audio, more RAM).

It's also worth noting that Quest 3 is not online-only. It works fine offline once you've logged in once (people use it on planes, in parks, in the car, etc.). But this particular issue at Meta forcibly logged out users, then the API appeared online while failing all future login attempts. Ironically, users that work offline never noticed the outage because the bug couldn't log them out.

[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?

[docmars]

To clarify my thoughts on this, I responded here to a similar reply:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39611122

[Analemma_]

The parent's comment is about how it quite literally is not a standalone headset, as is currently being demonstrated.

[TulliusCicero]

It is a standalone headset. You don't need a tethered gaming PC or console for the Quest series of headsets.

[schmorptron]

I thought that too, but it seems like you need a tethered cloud PC somewhere at meta to open apps after all.

[TulliusCicero]

Only because there's a bug, seems like. Normally you can turn off your wifi entirely and the headset continues to work fine. Tried disconnecting entirely in a non-standalone headset and see how that works out for you.

Standalone just means you don't need to tether to a PC or console.

[nine_k]

Standalone, but not autonomous.

[d00nut]

Steam Index is great if you don't care about cords / needing a PC. Easy to do VRchat, IRacing, or even blade & sorcery game sessions for 3-4+ hours without any eye strain, headaches, motion sickness, or discomfort from the headset.

It also fits over / around glasses

Biggest reason not to IMO is of the rumors around an "index2".

[CoastalCoder]

Seconded, I think. I've been very happy with my Valve Index, but I don't know how it compares to newer headsets on the market.

More broadly, I find that Valve represents my interests far more than Facebook/Meta does. So I'd much rather send my money to Valve.

[munk-a]

I'll third this - Valve is really unobtrusive about the steam related features of the index. It does have some requirements with steam for setup but if you want to run a local binary and mess around with dev tools it's extremely easy to do. It's also extremely well sealed and designed - I tend to sweat a lot and a few times I've been beat sabering for quite a while without any long term damage to the headset.

[cesarb]

> Biggest reason not to IMO is of the rumors around an "index2".

Another big reason not to buy a Steam Index is "not available in your country". The only VR headsets I've seen in stores here are the Quest 2/3 and the PSVR2; and the Steam store page for the Valve Index (and the Steam Deck) says "not available in your country".

[lewsid]

I'm typing this from Immersed in the Quest 3, no issues.

[ahupp]

There may be a bug or change since I left, but I built the app library and authorization logic, and it was explicitly designed to work offline. Of course, using it day-to-day and initial setup are different and I'd imagine if Apple is down it's hard to setup an AVP as well.

[practice9]

Unless it's a recent change, it works perfectly fine offline (wifi turned off).

As for alternatives, there is Pico, but Quest 3 may be superior in games selection. Or go wired which is of course less portable

[extraduder_ire]

This is different from it being offline, it's like the device is kicked off the associated account. A "something went wrong" window pops up with a "generate device code" button, with instructions on how to remove and re-pair the headset.

There is no way to even access wifi settings or anything else to disconnect the device from the internet. If it's still a problem much later in the day, I'll try turning off my router to see what that does.

[practice9]

Interesting. I had a problem a few months ago with DNS not resolving Meta servers on my Starlink internet connection, but I was able to use the UI and the apps nonetheless, just couldn't open the store or update firmware.

Seems like they really did change something in the latest firmwares.

[fmsf]

In my case I was doing iRacing with a cable, it requires the Oculus app to run for the link to work. Which in turn needs the login to be active.

[dartos]

I think you need to be online for the first setup of the headset, otherwise it won’t work at all.

[IggleSniggle]

Yes. You login first, and then it completes device setup. At least, that's how it works for the Rift.

[xp84]

imho this is a stance you certainly have every right to take, but good luck. If you want to be part of the world of things like VR, smartphones, etc. then refusing (on principle) to participate in things like "accounts" and "cloud" is going to cost you far more time than the number of hours a massive company like Meta may have downtime. Likewise, yes, at some undetermined future date a lot of this hardware will become a complete doorstop due to their supporting servers being taken offline, however again, if you are doing this advanced gadget thing, it'll be long after you would have decided to upgrade to new hardware anyway because it can't do any of the latest stuff.

(and yes, there are ways if you're devoted enough, to roll your own everything and run Linux on a Framework laptop, and use some kind of custom ROM on your phone without Google anything, 3d print yourself a VR headset, etc. But all of this will cost you several orders of magnitude more time than Meta outages ever would.

[bloaf]

I think the current buzz in the VR space is the "Bigscreen Beyond" which eschews all of the nice-to-haves in order to make the headset as light as possible, and the result is surprisingly compelling.

[TulliusCicero]

It looks compelling for high-end PC gaming VR enthusiasts, but if GP is more of a mainstream consumer it probably won't make sense for them.

At least from what I've read, there's a bunch of downsides for regular consumers: very expensive ($1000) -- SUPER expensive if you bundle in controllers and tracking points (~$1600), needs external tracking, wired instead of wireless, no built-in audio, can effectively only be used by one person (because each one is built custom to your face), and of course it's not a standalone headset, it has to be hooked up to a gaming PC.

[xp84]

Great news: Thanks to Apple, $1600 is now a budget super-economy VR headset!

Courage.

[YeBanKo]

I could not play a steam game on a PC in offline mode when my internet was down. This issue is not exclusive to fb.

[IggleSniggle]

That's not a Steam thing though, but rather the specific software. Steam explicitly has an exit path for the user if Valve disappeared overnight that allows their downloaded games to continue working offline.

The difference being that we are discussing platforms, not the things that run on those platforms.

[YeBanKo]

Steam Offline wants you to go online and perform a bunch of steps, including launching games and then enabling offline mode. Every game launch is is probably a download of at least few hundred megabytes of data. And then every game requires its own networks where your account linked to steam acc, etc. and Rockstar games iirc it you must be online when you launch the game. So the fact that Steam client has offline mode is irrelevant and misleading.

[IggleSniggle]

That has not been my experience. Any online game is going to be its own thing, dependent on the choices of the game company. Inherently, Steam does not require all the steps you're describing.

Sidenote, but my experience with the Rockstar launcher has been absolutely atrocious, to the point that I just avoid rockstar at this point even though I'd otherwise be interested because I've been burned so many times. That's a Rockstar issue, not a Steam issue.

[paulryanrogers]

Doesn't Steam still offer an offline mode that works with most games?

[cesarb]

In my experience, the Steam offline mode only works if your computer is actually offline (without any network connection); if you're connected to the local network but the Internet connection from your router is down, it still tries to connect to the authentication servers while starting up.

[YeBanKo]

Rockstar games require you to have an account at the launch iirc. And this us kind misleading, because while technically Steam has offline mode, but not necessarily the games you purchased on Steam. But having a unified UX is why I want to use the platform like steam to begin with.

[callalex]

It does offer an offline mode. It does NOT work with most games, because the publishers literally can't help themselves but add more layers of DRM on top of steam DRM and most of those these days require always online connections.

[cesarb]

Were you still connected to your local network? Next time it happens, try completely disconnecting from your local network before starting Steam, it seems to use the presence of a local network connection to decide whether to enable offline mode or not.

[samtheprogram]

Have never had this problem. There must have been something specific to your scenario, like the game wasn't downloaded, or it's a specific title?

[darrenf]

I used my Quest 3 for a couple of gaming breaks during the outage with no issues.

[darrenf]

I am wondering why I had no issues, since Meta themselves are saying yep, Quests booted people out. I was definitely online (albeit not playing multiplayer). Odd. https://www.uploadvr.com/meta-explains-why-quest-headsets-st...

[idle_zealot]

I can confirm that I was unable to use my Quest 3 this morning. I left it connected to the internet, it tried to phone home I guess, and then locked itself into a "please connect this headset to your Meta account" state.

I am so sick of companies "selling" computers that they continue to control. In what universe does Meta have the right to remotely lock my headset and prevent me from using it to run the software I installed on it? If I were to sell my current desktop computer, or phone, or whatever, on any marketplace, and leave a remote login account on it that I then used to continue to operate the computer as though it were mine remotely, installing software, playing games, and occasionally peeking at what the current owner was doing, that would be obviously criminal. How is this any different? Because I signed away my rights when I "agreed" to their Terms and Conditions box (which I was compelled to do to use the hardware I purchased)?

Something is so fundamentally broken in the current ownership/property landscape. We somehow ended up in a world where people don't own the most critical tools in their lives, companies have managed to recreate feudal fiefdoms within the bounds of the market.

[rixthefox]

Ubisoft Director of Subscriptions really opened the floodgates of bad behavior when they came out saying "Gamers need to get comfortable with not owning their games".

I think these companies need to be reminded they do not own our PCs either.

I'm really starting to like that mantra of "If buying isn't owning then piracy isn't stealing".

[ljm]

The full context of that quote, which everyone conveniently omits, is ”for subscriptions to take off”.

As in, gaming subscription services like Xbox’s GamePass won’t succeed if gamers prefer to buy games over paying a monthly sub.

[bonton89]

I can understand your frustration but were you not aware of the software lock in when you bought it? I'm not defending the ownership erosion, but I avoided these things specifically because of who was selling it and how it was locked to them.

[idle_zealot]

I was aware. They are the only game in town when it comes to standalone VR. I want to play BeatSaber, a game I purchased when I used an Oculus Quest, and the only way to do that now is by subjecting myself to Meta's whims. I compromise on my ideals to have nice things, but will continue to complain when I feel that I or others have been wronged.

[IggleSniggle]

Not OP but I bought a Rift when it was still just Oculus.

...then Facebook bought Oculus...

...and then required you to have a Meta account to continue using the Oculus drivers.

It's a real "boil the frog" strategy and this is still early days for VR in terms of realized market value. The time to push back on this bullshit is yesterday. As we can all see, nobody can compete with Meta on price with the Quest 3, but the cost to purchase is heavily subsidized by the expected futures.

[bonton89]

If you bought a Rift before facebook purchased them I wouldn't call it boiling the frog, more like being stabbed in the back. Not much to do there but sell your device but I guess most people probably hoped things would turn out differently than they did. This is one of the most infuriating parts of America now, if you hate a company and never want to interact with them some merger comes along and throws you into being their customer again against your will.

Of course, OP owns a Quest 3 so its more cut and dry there.

[m3kw9]

You can’t have everything. If you want a VR headset you described, there may not be any good ecosystem of software yet and you’d have to wait. This means you are gonna use your headset even less, think about how often fb goes down, it goes down for 2-3 hours once a year and it also has to coincide with the time you are using it? It doesn’t make sense to be this risk adverse

[ZealousFerret]

Quest is the best option right now

[makestuff]

Is there any reason to get the quest pro over the quest 3? Or should I wait for a quest pro refresh?

[DonHopkins]

Lucky you didn't already have a Quest 3, and you were in CyberSpace when Facebook crashed, because then you would be trapped in CyberSpace and die. That's how it works, you know.

[squidsoup]

The Sony PSVR2 is getting PC support by end of year apparently.

[zer0zzz]

This is pretty cool. I might get one if I’m convinced it’s better than my quest3s display link.

[callalex]

Whatever you do, get one of the all-in-ones that doesn’t require setting up tracking beacons. They are universally a pain and will cause you to never bother playing.

[EMCymatics]

Offline gaming should never have been destroyed.

Wonder what data they collect from gamers.

[Jemm]

I was able to use my Quest 3 throughout the outage for offline games.