I had the Oculus quest DK2 before oculus was bought by Facebook and enjoyed playing whatever people made, but the more Facebook locked everything down the less interested I became in VR.
Now you can’t even play with a quest unless you have a Facebook account, and it seems so easy to get locked out of your account on purpose or accidentally.
Are there unlocked VR headsets that I can just have fun with instead of being locked into one company and their products?
Thanks
Thanks for the detailed answer.
What kind of VR headsets are basically monitors?
I don’t even know about those, that was basically what I was using with the dk2, so I’d be pretty comfortable with that.
My main reticence over having an account for a headset is that you can be locked out of the account and then your headset becomes useless.
I remember that happening to a lot of quest users and since I’ve been looking it up since I opened this post, there are plenty more of those stories still going around, being locked out of their account and not being able to use their quest.
Being locked out only happened when it was a facebook account, that was the whole reason they went back to Oculus accounts. People would do dumb stuff on facebook and get banned, not knowing they would lose their games from that too. And despite the accounts being linked, they were still handled by two different departments, with poorly trained staff. You’d occasionally get someone that could restore your purchases, but the vast majority didn’t know how and passed the buck and blamed the other team.
It was just a huge unnecessary headache. It doesn’t happen anymore. You can be a huge jerk all you like on the internet and it won’t cost your games anymore, it’ll just cost what it normally costs.
As for headsets that work like monitors, it would be the ones that have HDMI or Display Port, ideally display port at this point as the res and framerate is getting up there and display port is more likely to be up to date on your hardware. They don’t have their own games and can’t be used wirelessly, but they should work for pcvr still.
https://youtu.be/ANjVcI6s2NA
This one seems to be one of the more popular options, but it also kinda sounds like it sucks. But, no account needed apparently. Not sure the value is worth the cost.
Oh, I do like that, thanks, that was a good and informative video, I’m going to see what else is in that sort of vein.
That’s also great to know about the Oculus accounts, there are still a bunch of complaints about the quest 3 being locked out or unresponsive, but I see they’re more about technical issues rather than being locked out of the account.
I remember when they used to use the Facebook accounts and I couldn’t believe it. When people said that they were locked away from the console that they bought, that was just insane to me.
Thank you very much.
If you really don’t want to be tied to any accounts, buying something like an HTC vive 2nd hand and setting it up on a linux computer using Envision is probably the most libre VR setup you can reasonably get that is both capable and affordable. Keep in mind the HTC vive is from 2016 so the screens and optics are not great but the 2nd hand cost should reflect that. The only account you will need if you want a good experience will be a Steam account since Envision borrows a driver from SteamVR to work, though once you have done that you could just log out. LVRA is a great source of info for this stuff.
Okay, cool. Thanks.
I’m going to dig into that site, there is way more to this question than I thought there was haha.