Virtual Reality

[Asura]

: "and frankly, as we've heard your feedback more broadly, we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We're starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we're working on making a broader shift here within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences and I get that, especially as the metaverse expands."

Yeah, we'll need to see how the situation develops, but it seems FB have at least made a positive move, here & that their VR and Microsoft Teams equivalents will ALWAYS be limited if they insist you use a public social real-name profile for everything.

It creates tons of issues. Just this month I read a question on Reddit, where a real estate person wanted to use the Quest for virtual viewings but had concerns about how that works re: the account requirements.

I'm sure you will need a Met account or whatever that ends up being called, but in that respect it at least goes back to the way Oculus worked before, which was similar to PSN/Xbox Live.

Edit:

On a more functional and technical basis, I think that there was just a lot of confusion and awkwardness about having the company brand be also the brand of one of the social media apps. When people wanted to go sign into their Quest, we wanted them to sign in with their Facebook account because we wanted to have a single identity or account system for the company. Google has that, Apple has that. Microsoft has it. But for us, the issue is that if you’re signing into Quest or WhatsApp or Instagram with a Facebook account, I think that there was a confusion about, “Am I signing into this with my Facebook corporate account or is this going to be tied to my social media account?” People had concerns on Quest. “If I don’t want to use Facebook or if something happens and my account gets deactivated, is my device now going to get bricked?” That’s a concern that I think people shouldn’t have to have. People had concerns that, “If I sign into Instagram with this or if I sign into WhatsApp with it, does that mean that my data is somehow gonna get shared over here in a way that I didn’t want?”

[MartyG]

Decoupling the account from Facebook profiles would definitely be a move in the right direction.

With regards to using the Quest commercially, well yes you can do that as Oculus has a version of the Quest 2 that does just that (and that's what you should be using). That doesn't have a Facebook login requirement, but it also isn't £300: https://business.oculus.com/products/?locale=en_GB

[Brad]

: "and frankly, as we've heard your feedback more broadly, we're working on making it so you can log into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account. We're starting to test support for work accounts soon, and we're working on making a broader shift here within the next year. I know this is a big deal for a lot of people. Not everyone wants their social media profile linked to all these other experiences and I get that, especially as the metaverse expands."

The choice of words...

So another Facebook account maybe? ;-)

[Brad]

Decoupling the account from Facebook profiles would definitely be a move in the right direction.

With regards to using the Quest commercially, well yes you can do that as Oculus has a version of the Quest 2 that does just that (and that's what you should be using). That doesn't have a Facebook login requirement, but it also isn't £300: https://business.oculus.com/products/?locale=en_GB

Interesting!! So we see the true price of that device. I never knew about this.

I wonder if you could hack a regular Quest 2 to turn it into a business one...

[MartyG]

Dunno, I don't believe the hardware is actually different, so maybe - but you'd need to be able to get at the bootloader and I haven't seen anything on that front for a while. If you can get to root access, you'd hack out the login anyway.

There's always Oculess

[Dogg Thang]

Perfect headline: Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb485/zuckerberg-facebook-new-name-meta-metaverse-presentation

[Brad]

Perfect headline: Zuckerberg Announces Fantasy World Where Facebook Is Not a Horrible Company
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjb4...e-presentation

Whole article is great!

[MartyG]

Whilst I thought the presentation was a bit fanciful - I don't agree with Jason Koebler that the vision is impossible. It's not like Zuckerberg was suggesting this was releasing next year.

The reason people like Zuckerberg are successful, is because their vision isn't constrained by the sort of thinking that goes "delusional fever dream" - Zuckerberg was pitching an idea more than anything else. I do agree that Facebook has issues to solve that wouldn't go away in online world, but that wasn't really the point of a keynote presentation.

I'm still not giving it more than 3/10 tho. It was a rip off of Ready Player One.

[Neon Ignition]

Yep, as much as it all felt a bit much it was largely all just an extension of where things are now. Not so much a thing for the company as more so a vision of where tech is headed anyway. It served its main purpose though, to get everyone talking about how awful the new name is rather than how much dirt is being kicked up about them

[Asura]

Interesting!! So we see the true price of that device. I never knew about this.

I wonder if you could hack a regular Quest 2 to turn it into a business one...

Admittedly the Business headset price comes with some extras; I think you get 1:1 support with Oculus for various problems for a duration. It also runs different software so you can't connect to the Oculus store or do most of the stuff the consumer headset does. Lastly, I think you need to be registered as a business with Facebook to buy them, so it's not really a way "around" FB's systems, it just side-steps one of the core problems with using it in that context.

Presumably all of this will be moot when this Meta change comes in, though. It seems it's going to be like when you had a Google Account and Google+ existed; not everyone with a Google account had a Google+ account (I never did).

[Neon Ignition]

I'm not saying the name Oculus is some great wording but the very notion of the name Meta Quest genuinely feels like it's going to actively hurt VR and Facebooks success post-Quest 2 moving forward. It's just overtly nerdy and reeks of having been decided on by people completely out of touch with the mass audience that made them popular to begin with.

[MartyG]

It's not going to be called Meta Quest - Meta is the parent company (just like Alphabet), the brands (Facebook, Instagram, Oculus) remain.

We are not the target audience for the Metaverse, it's aimed at a younger demographic where Facebook is losing audience share to TikTok, Roblox etc.

[Neon Ignition]

It's good if Oculus is remaining as the brand, though I suppose likewise if they brands remain and the umbrella company changes its name would the audiences even notice?

[Asura]

It's good if Oculus is remaining as the brand, though I suppose likewise if they brands remain and the umbrella company changes its name would the audiences even notice?

It will vary, depending on use-case. Many people probably won't; like, how many people actually know that Google are called Alphabet now? I suspect not many outside of the tech sphere.

But it will affect some things. In particular, Facebook's seamless-single-sign-on service will probably change to Meta. So if you're logging into, I dunno, the Cineworld website to buy tickets, you'll use a Meta sign-on, not a Facebook one. This makes the service more attractive; I think historically when people have seen those options, they've chosen "sign in via email" instead because they don't know what FB will do with that information, or how much FB info Cineworld gets from you, whereas with Meta, it'll probably be much clearer how these things relate.

[wakka]

It's good if Oculus is remaining as the brand, though I suppose likewise if they brands remain and the umbrella company changes its name would the audiences even notice?

Probably not, but they aren't necessarily meant to. The point of a parent brand like this is to strengthen and better define individual brands that sit under the umbrella.

Facebook's brand is highly recognisable but embattled and associated with a very specific product. By rebranding the group as Meta, you strengthen the Facebook brand's association with the actual Facebook product, instead of diluting it across a bunch of disparate stuff. Likewise that disparate stuff has its own brands which are in turn strengthened by a clear association with their own products.

But you still need some way of saying 'This is a ZuckbergCorp product', so you have Meta - the overarching branding which is broad enough to not be associated with a specific product but still gives clarity as to the company behind it.