I have been sharing this to try to raise awareness, the impact is going to be high!
Companies are really struggling to optimise their suppliers, it is pretty hard. If they start on bill of materials they can often sort by most common parts and then it becomes a graph problem finding “cheapest” paths between often traversing four tables bom <> parts <> suppliers <> tariffs.
The really hard part is mapping parts down to sku level to tariff codes. Specially at scale (think datasets with many million rows).
Either way we built https://www.searchtariff.com/?q=lights as an entry point and and have been getting more and more worried with the market as we help companies out. They are not ready for this at all and it is bitting deep. Let us know if you also need help mapping products to tariffs, we have a product for that!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
This doesn't explain why its _required_. It just means there is precedent.
Your other point is better, although I think you mean it would cost the consumer more for the hardware, right? The hardware would cost the same to produce, it's just that the company would miss out on surveillance based revenue.
It's a reasonable point, fb would make less money if they made an open headset, possibly to the point that they wouldn't make it all.
But the world where fb doesn't make any headset, and the world where they make an unacceptable headset are basically equivalent to me - the former might even have an edge in that shitty relationships with corporations aren't being encouraged (like they are throughout everything tech related currently). Granted, them blazing the trail has a tiny chance of enabling a reasonable alternative to come along in the future.
But I am a bit of a Luddite, and I know that people want their toys, and they want them now.
> the company would miss out on surveillance based revenue.
More than likely most of Meta's revenue from the Quest series other than hardware is based off of, y'know, selling games. I doubt tracking what games you play to target ads in the OS is more valuable than the money they make when people actually buy games.
In Facebook or Instagram, you're looking at a space that they can shoot lots of
ads into, and it's otherwise very hard to monetize. But a gaming-focused VR headset is a different story. Most of the time you're not looking at anything that can have ads in it, but you can actually sell stuff very easily.
Maybe this'll change someday if they actually get social media shit in there that's popular, I'm sure Meta would love that, but so far that hasn't happened.
> But the world where fb doesn't make any headset, and the world where they make an unacceptable headset are basically equivalent to me
Popularizing the format is useful for pushing the tech forward. A big player pushing lots of devices means that the supply chains feeding the manufacture of those devices bulk up too, not to mention other knock-on effects like greater consumer awareness, and "free research" for whoever copies what the market leader does (at least for things that aren't IP-protected).
> But I am a bit of a Luddite, and I know that people want their toys, and they want them now.
> More than likely most of Meta's revenue from the Quest series other than hardware is based off of, y'know, selling games. I doubt tracking what games you play to target ads in the OS is more valuable than the money they make when people actually buy games.
Isn't that a great argument for why they don't need to have such a hard requirement for a logged in session? Consoles didn't have an internet connection for the longest time, though only because it wasnt feasible yet. They moved a lot of games.
> I can hear the sneer from over here, yes.
I don't mean it as judgment, I know I'm the weirdo here. Sorry if that came off rude.
> Consoles didn't have an internet connection for the longest time, though only because it wasnt feasible yet. They moved a lot of games.
Consoles had physical games. VR headsets don't. Consoles treat digital games the same way Meta is doing them here, I think; if you get logged out, no more games.
The problem here isn't that Meta servers are merely down -- losing connection usually doesn't mean losing access to your library of games on consoles, or Steam. The problem appears to be that authentication is failing such that you're actually being essentially logged out, which would definitely lose you access to digital games on every console as well as Steam.
Which, I mean yeah, that's a big fuck-up on Meta's part.
> Consoles had physical games. VR headsets don't. Consoles treat digital games the same way Meta is doing them here, I think; if you get logged out, no more games.
Again, consoles and steam do this because they want to, because it benefits them, and consumers don't put any meaningful pressure on them for doing so. It's not some kind of fundamental requirement. It's helpful for e.g. anti piracy stuff, but not necessary. It is 100% feasible to sell me a digital copy of a game and then not hang around on my system and watch me play it.
People let triple A PC games basically put rootkits on their systems. It's not like the games wouldn't work just fine (or better even!) without them. It's just that approximately nobody cares, and the companies will do whatatever you let them do.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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".
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Stackoverflow not having a public whitelabled version was their demise, not having something for a public community that is sellable without having to go through the Area51 provess was their demise. Discourse has been eating their lunch. https://www.discourse.org/customers
In many countries it is illegal to change anything with the vehicle without going through a homologation afterwards, unless the parts are already homologated. This happens because it affects security and can be a danger to others and you. The consequences can range from fines to the destruction of the car.
Later that evening: “Five killed in car crash. Evidence points to use of seat heaters without paying subscription fee, thus making the vehicle not suitable for highway commute.”
