That’s pretty much already the case. By now Occulus only exists as a brand inside the Facebook ecosystem, only legacy Occulus accounts are allowed, everybody else uses their Facebook account to login and tie purchases too.
The same Facebook account that FB can at any time arbitrarily block and demand the owner properly ID themselves.
A situation that originally was deemed as “will never happen” when Occulus originally got acquired by FB.
At least there is also Valve to offer an alternative that’s more privacy minded. But this makes their hardware offerings more expensive by default, as the device prices can’t be subsidized by monetizing their users.
At heart Occulus is really an android system right? It would be such a shame if they where to grab control over this ecosystem. Unfortunately their set seems to be the most viable path to mainstream adoption.
Valve exists but Valve's alternative is way pricier and requires a computer right? Facebook would be able to mass-produce these devices at a low cost in a completely different way it seems.
So since it is an android system under the hood it would be very possible to make VR apps that would work on all android systems. This would be so much better for the ecosystem as a whole.
Surely there are WebXR standards that would basically be webapps so they would be totally platform independent however this will surely not cut it for all applications.
Seeing how social media companies can manipulate politics and steer behaviour through ads imagine what happens in a VR only reality. This is a total nightmare scenario.
Would it be possible to try to create some sort of campaign to make people more aware about the bad effects of this lock in. Perhaps by finding a suitable chinese device that remains open and try to favour that over facebooks versions. Sort of how Huawei managed to more or less copy devices at a lower costs and get into the market that way?
Microsofts Mixed Reality standard deserves some attention as well obviously. Again this requires a PC and they seem to be a bit more pricier as well. These wouldn't require base stations as well.
Well, the only "new" headset is the HP Reverb G2 which is indeed in the premium segment. But if you consider the used market, Samsung Odyssey+ is an incredible value option.
I hope Microsoft aren't completely sitting on their asses, they have everything they need to enter the standalone market and provide an alternative to Facebook. They have the Qualcomm partnership, they already have a standalone AR hardware project, it really shouldn't be hard to offer Windows-for-headsets to partners like HP…
I think Lenovo has released Mixed Reality headsets in a lower price range that seems decent.
I think the problem with the PC ecosystem that it is difficult to find an open framework that covers all the different systems.
All in all I am quite impressed with the Microsoft effort. It doesn't seem to lock customers in. There seems to be a possibility to use them with Linux as well.
Also the Microsoft AR system seems quite well executed as well even though it is definitely to costly for mainstream adoption. This is probably by design though and will go down for sure due to economy of scale.
So there would be web technologies that covers most of the platforms, albeit at a performance cost. At the end of the day maybe this is all about which SDK that covers the most platform and is the best for the developers.
>So since it is an android system under the hood it would be very possible to make VR apps that would work on all android systems. This would be so much better for the ecosystem as a whole.
The problem isn't technical, it's monetary. Facebook pours out tons of money to kickstart developers and get games out which is why they have a monopoly. There are few technical hurdles in the way of making Oculus games work on other headsets.
The same Facebook account that FB can at any time arbitrarily block and demand the owner properly ID themselves.
A situation that originally was deemed as “will never happen” when Occulus originally got acquired by FB.
At least there is also Valve to offer an alternative that’s more privacy minded. But this makes their hardware offerings more expensive by default, as the device prices can’t be subsidized by monetizing their users.