The biggest questions (and anxiety) that I have right now is regarding the Oculus for Business (OfB) program.
I develop a social VR experience for students of foreign languages. It's an activity we provide in addition to our traditional classroom based instruction. Our students are primarily government employees, in diplomatic, defense, or intelligence roles.
When the pandemic hit, we had a huge problem. We needed to pivot our experience away from in-person and figure out a solution to continue development and testing with remote learning. So we built a new teleconferencing feature into the app and started shipping headsets directly to the student. They use them a couple of times for their classes and then ship it back.
This pivot also came at the exact same time that we had the first kerfuffle over the Quest 2 requiring a Facebook login, which made it a complete non-starter for organizations like US intelligence agencies.
Our product is a WebXR experience, which can technically run on any headset on the market. Any sort of PC tethered devices would mean we would have to also ship a gaming laptop to the students, because we can't count on their PC being powerful enough to run a VR headset at all. That would be significantly more expensive and would overcomplicate the setup for students. We can't ship Pico Neo headsets because their employers are fearful of the Chinese ownership of the company. We can't ship Vive Focus devices because, well, the lenses suck and have made even me, a hardened VR user, sick. The OfB Quest 2s that we have are really the best user experience we can provide right now.
With Oculus for Business, the users of the headsets did not need any sort of login whatsoever. It was the best case scenario for us. WebXR nominally keeps us from being platform-locked-in, and the enterprise licensing terms keep our customers happy. I say "nominally", because the only other, realistic option for it right now is PC tethered devices. All of the non-Quest standalones only have an ancient version of Firefox available as a browser. Mozilla laid off all of their VR developers and has not had anyone releasing updates to Firefox Reality in over a year. There are spec changes and defects that they've not kept up with that are significant impediments to continued development. On the other hand, Facebook builds a version of Chromium as the browser on the Quest, that they keep very up to date and have some excellent performance optimizations built in.
But Meta is ending new OfB purchases at the end of this year [0]. There is a Quest for Business (QfB) program that they have announced, but it won't be generally available until at least 2023. In an FAQ [1], they talk about options for migration. Migrate the existing OfB headsets to use the consumer Quest 2 software, migrate to QfB "when it becomes available" (starting a closed beta later this year, going to open beta "sometime in 2022"), or continue using OfB (which means no system updates in the near future [2]).
What is not clear is what that means regarding headset users being required to have some sort of device login. They say QfB will have "Work accounts" to log in instead of a personal Facebook account. But what, exactly, does that mean? Are these accounts that we can provision per headset, so users can check headsets out of a locker or we can ship to the students and they can just use them? Or will they have to be per-user accounts?
I can abide per-headset accounts. Our clients are not going to abide per-actual-user accounts.
This has been a frustrating experience, to say the least. I keep hoping Microsoft will wake up one day and realize that waveguide displays are stupid, rip them out of the HoloLens, put in some opaque displays, and give us a standalone VR headset, with a decent browser, that my USG customers can abide. But they aren't listening to me.
[2] OfB devices are currently on v28 of the system software, whereas the consumer SKUs are on v33, which has significant defect fixes and performance improvements. They've stated that v29 will be the last version deployed for OfB, so that's pretty annoying.
I develop a social VR experience for students of foreign languages. It's an activity we provide in addition to our traditional classroom based instruction. Our students are primarily government employees, in diplomatic, defense, or intelligence roles.
When the pandemic hit, we had a huge problem. We needed to pivot our experience away from in-person and figure out a solution to continue development and testing with remote learning. So we built a new teleconferencing feature into the app and started shipping headsets directly to the student. They use them a couple of times for their classes and then ship it back.
This pivot also came at the exact same time that we had the first kerfuffle over the Quest 2 requiring a Facebook login, which made it a complete non-starter for organizations like US intelligence agencies.
Our product is a WebXR experience, which can technically run on any headset on the market. Any sort of PC tethered devices would mean we would have to also ship a gaming laptop to the students, because we can't count on their PC being powerful enough to run a VR headset at all. That would be significantly more expensive and would overcomplicate the setup for students. We can't ship Pico Neo headsets because their employers are fearful of the Chinese ownership of the company. We can't ship Vive Focus devices because, well, the lenses suck and have made even me, a hardened VR user, sick. The OfB Quest 2s that we have are really the best user experience we can provide right now.
With Oculus for Business, the users of the headsets did not need any sort of login whatsoever. It was the best case scenario for us. WebXR nominally keeps us from being platform-locked-in, and the enterprise licensing terms keep our customers happy. I say "nominally", because the only other, realistic option for it right now is PC tethered devices. All of the non-Quest standalones only have an ancient version of Firefox available as a browser. Mozilla laid off all of their VR developers and has not had anyone releasing updates to Firefox Reality in over a year. There are spec changes and defects that they've not kept up with that are significant impediments to continued development. On the other hand, Facebook builds a version of Chromium as the browser on the Quest, that they keep very up to date and have some excellent performance optimizations built in.
But Meta is ending new OfB purchases at the end of this year [0]. There is a Quest for Business (QfB) program that they have announced, but it won't be generally available until at least 2023. In an FAQ [1], they talk about options for migration. Migrate the existing OfB headsets to use the consumer Quest 2 software, migrate to QfB "when it becomes available" (starting a closed beta later this year, going to open beta "sometime in 2022"), or continue using OfB (which means no system updates in the near future [2]).
What is not clear is what that means regarding headset users being required to have some sort of device login. They say QfB will have "Work accounts" to log in instead of a personal Facebook account. But what, exactly, does that mean? Are these accounts that we can provision per headset, so users can check headsets out of a locker or we can ship to the students and they can just use them? Or will they have to be per-user accounts?
I can abide per-headset accounts. Our clients are not going to abide per-actual-user accounts.
This has been a frustrating experience, to say the least. I keep hoping Microsoft will wake up one day and realize that waveguide displays are stupid, rip them out of the HoloLens, put in some opaque displays, and give us a standalone VR headset, with a decent browser, that my USG customers can abide. But they aren't listening to me.
[0] https://developer.oculus.com/blog/evolving-from-oculus-for-b...
[1] https://business.oculus.com/faq/
[2] OfB devices are currently on v28 of the system software, whereas the consumer SKUs are on v33, which has significant defect fixes and performance improvements. They've stated that v29 will be the last version deployed for OfB, so that's pretty annoying.