OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

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cbrunschen
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by cbrunschen » Wed Jul 14, 2021 10:09 am

Xavier wrote:
Thu Jul 08, 2021 5:07 pm
IMHO, you can also survive with a facebook account, and enjoy VR!
Unfortunately, as I described, Facebook demand that a Facebook account has to be tied to an actual person - anything else is considered a breach of their terms of service and any such account may be terminated at any time. All Facebook/Oculus headsets also require the user to be signed in to their Facebook account - and sharing your Facebook account with other people is also not permitted by Facebook's own terms of service - so any business or club that wants to use an Oculus headset is not able to do that (*).

And that's without considering anything about advertising, or whether Facebook themselves are a company you want to support: Simply put, Facebook are making it impossible for some to use Oculus headsets for Condor, by Facebook's own explicit terms.

So while I personally use an Oculus Quest headset quite happily, there are some who literally can't go down the Oculus route.

But beyond that, personal objections to being forced to sign into specifically a Facebook account are perfectly valid - especially when there are other headsets around, many of which a person might also prefer to use for technical reasons, rather than the only current Oculus headset, the Oculus Quest 2. For example, someone wanting a wider field of view might prefer a Pimax 8k Super; someone who doesn't care for the 'standalone' aspects (which make the Oculus Quest heavier at the front) might prefer an HP Reverb G2. Or someone in China might prefer to use a Pico Neo 3. Or for a taller field of view and higher resolution someone might want an HTC Vive Pro 2. Or someone with extra-deep pockets might get themselves a Varjo VR-3 for an absolutely stunning visual experience!

So sure, you as an individual may consider it acceptable to use a Facebook headset - as I have done for myself. But that doesn't mean there aren't perfectly valid reasons to not make that same choice, or to not want to or for other reasons choose to use a Facebook account, even as an individual; or that there aren't valid reasons to prefer a different VR headset than the Oculus Quest 2; or indeed, that there aren't legal reasons why someone may not be able to use a Facebook account and thus an Oculus headset.

All those reasons are why it would be excellent if Condor supported not just the Oculus runtime, but the industry standard OpenXR runtime: that would allow Condor to run on VR headsets from a wide range of manufacturers, with different tradeoffs and capabilities and availability in different parts of the world.

And considering that the VR experience in Condor is actually absolutely awesome and lifts Condor to another level ... I really wish that this was something that the Condor team would do, and sooner rather than later. Especially since it would make some things not just better, but actually possible in a supported and non-hacky way.

(*): .Yes, the current solution using Revive or similar requires installing the Oculus VR runtime - but using it that way does not actually require the user to be signed in; that is only necessary to drive an Oculus headset directly. And it's the sign-in-to-an-individual-Facebook-account requirement that makes using Oculus headsets by a business or a club against Facebook's terms of service. While there is an 'Oculus Quest 2 for business', which is described as "Oculus for Business platform (no Facebook login required)", that only applies to software running on the headset itself: Condor runs on a PC, and driving an Oculus headset from a PC via Link "requires the use of consumer software instead of the Oculus for Business enterprise software" and thus still requires signing in to a Facebook account

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OXO
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by OXO » Fri Jul 16, 2021 9:12 am

I cannot give you a date, but it will be done. We have more important things in development right now, so I ask you to be patient.
Chris Wedgwood,
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pckormic
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by pckormic » Sat Jul 17, 2021 11:49 pm

OXO wrote:
Fri Jul 16, 2021 9:12 am
I cannot give you a date, but it will be done. We have more important things in development right now, so I ask you to be patient.
Thanks for the info, Oxo, but...

Could you give us some hints about those "more important things" in development? :roll: :wink:
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Sailabout
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Sailabout » Sat Jul 24, 2021 6:45 am

Facebook will deprecate its proprietary Oculus APIs in favor of industry standard OpenXR.

ref: https://uploadvr.com/facebook-deprecates-oculus/

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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by OXO » Sat Jul 24, 2021 9:42 am

pckormic wrote:
Sat Jul 17, 2021 11:49 pm

Thanks for the info, Oxo, but...

Could you give us some hints about those "more important things" in development? :roll: :wink:
Yes I could..


but I won't
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Condor Team

Mas
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Mas » Sun Jul 25, 2021 3:26 am

Sailabout wrote:
Sat Jul 24, 2021 6:45 am
Facebook will deprecate its proprietary Oculus APIs in favor of industry standard OpenXR.

ref: https://uploadvr.com/facebook-deprecates-oculus/
Which they wouldn't do if they were that desperate to stop people accessing their hardware outside the Oculus ecosystem.

Krankenstein
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Krankenstein » Mon Aug 16, 2021 4:10 pm

OXO wrote:
Fri Jul 16, 2021 9:12 am
I cannot give you a date, but it will be done. We have more important things in development right now, so I ask you to be patient.
Sweet! Looking forward to it! :D Thank you already in advance!

pgtrots
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by pgtrots » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:40 pm

OXO wrote:
Fri Jul 16, 2021 9:12 am
I cannot give you a date, but it will be done. We have more important things in development right now, so I ask you to be patient.


Released today is update 2.1.7

The main change is the addition of a JSON output from Spectate! to give extra data for the live streaming of eSports Sailplane Grand Prix. Of course this feature can be used in other competitions too.

We took the opportunity to address some other issues;

– Plastic.dds alpha channel removed
– SGS1-26 index changed to 63
– Moved the DG1000S to School class
– Special Ventus3-18RCN.c3d for SGP. It’s available on Condor Club and is for use with the SGP Ventus 3 skins.
– EB29 pilot material corrected
– Min altitude bug fixed
– ASG29 added more drag in flaps L
– Logbook numbering bug fixed
:roll:

Jim610
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Jim610 » Mon Apr 04, 2022 8:40 am

OXO wrote:
Thu Mar 25, 2021 12:50 pm
I have already said we will be doing this, posting more requests won't affect it. Please remember that VR users are < 20% of Condor users, and probably much less than that.

We are currently working on some big new features and improvements to Condor, which are more important for the 80% of users.

OpenXR will come, but you must be patient.
Another year further on! How much more patient do we need to be?

Any update on OpenXR or WMR?

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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Jim610 » Sun Jul 03, 2022 3:09 pm

The silence in deafening!

Rix71
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Rix71 » Thu Jul 07, 2022 7:11 am

At this point my guess is that we will have to wait for Condor 3. I have given up hope for OpenXR support with Condor 2.

Tnash
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Tnash » Tue Jul 19, 2022 7:48 pm

There are a number of us that don't use Condor because it won't run on my Vice Pro 2. Wasted a lot of time trying to get it to run with revive but updated drivers conspired to thwart me. Having to settle for Xplane until Condor gets it act together.

Mas
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Mas » Sat Sep 10, 2022 2:42 am

The Condor >VR work the devs did was a bonus not a right for Condor users . Just buy a second hand Quest 2 to work with Condor - the Graphics are great and you don't need a Facebook account now if you don't want to link your headset via it .

cbrunschen
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by cbrunschen » Sun Sep 11, 2022 5:13 pm

Mas wrote:
Sat Sep 10, 2022 2:42 am
The Condor >VR work the devs did was a bonus not a right for Condor users
VR support was a specific reason why I bought Condor; for me, VR support is not a "bonus" but really a core feature. And I'm fairly sure I'm not alone in this. There's really no comparison between using Condor (or really any flight simulator) on a flat screen (or even multiple flat screens) on the one hand, and in VR on the other hand: VR is vastly more immersive and offers stereoscopic vision, and is just a complete game-changer for how much I enjoy flying something simulated.

One might also note that both Microsoft's Flight Simulator and X-Plane – the two major general-purpose flight simulators out there – support VR, and are constantly improving their support for VR. So this is essentially becoming an expected feature in flight simulators.
Mas wrote:
Sat Sep 10, 2022 2:42 am
Just buy a second hand Quest 2 to work with Condor
It's not really up to you to dictate what other users are allowed to want to use.
Mas wrote:
Sat Sep 10, 2022 2:42 am
- the Graphics are great


The Quest 2's graphics are OK, but they're by no means the best available, and have never been. An HP Reverb G2 has significantly better graphics - not just the displays and the optics, but also the fact that the data is shown as rendered, rather than going through compression-and-decompression as is necessary with all currently available Meta headsets; that affects not only quality but also latency.

Every directly connected PC VR headset has that advantage over every headset that requires the use of a lower-bandwidth channel, whether wired or wireless. And even if you use an Oculus Link (or as they now call it 'Quest Link') cable, you still have those compression artefacts, that extra compression processing power use on your PC, and of course the added latency.

That's without even mentioning the significantly greater field of view available in some Pimax headsets, or the even further improved image quality and resolution of the Varjo Aero.

Limiting users' choice of VR headset to a single currently available model is extremely sad and not something that is just to be "handwaved away" as you seem to want to do.
Mas wrote:
Sat Sep 10, 2022 2:42 am
and you don't need a Facebook account now if you don't want to link your headset via it .
Facebook accounts were only ever one of several reasons why people want to be able to use other-than-Oculus-no-Facebook-no-Meta headsets, with support, rather than through workarounds that add their own issues.

And even Meta, of course, have long left the old "Oculus SDK" APIs (the VR APIs that Condor uses, and which are the reason why things are currently supported Meta/Facebook/Oculus-only) behind – it's nearly two years ago that "Facebook now recommends game engines support Oculus headsets via the OpenXR standard, not its proprietary SDK (software development kit)".

More and more competitors to Meta are also joining the market.

How would you feel if Condor only supported a single Joystick manufacturer's proprietary API, and all other joysticks had to use some sort of compatibility-layer plugin that only really works in an older version and even then doesn't give quite the sensor quality ... even though there exists an industry standard joystick API, which even that joystick manufacturer has now endorsed for years? Would you tell people to "just buy a second-hand FooStick" because it's "great", even though other and better alternatives are available?

I really enjoy Condor 2, and I really enjoy using my Oculus Quest (yes, the original version) with it. But the fact that I am currently able to work within this limitation, doesn't mean that the limitation is a good one, or a sensible one, or should not be removed so that people can use at least some of the many more available and in their own ways superior options.

Bendem
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Re: OpenXR Now That Oculus Requires Facebook Account?

Post by Bendem » Tue Nov 08, 2022 10:15 am

Over here another one guy who begs, cries, asks, shouts that you port the VR to OpenXR.
Seeing how long it's taking to port Mods as critical and big as Half-Life 2, I pray that we don't have to keep waiting (it's already been over two years), or that msfs2020 improves its dynamics, which is on the right track.
The first thing that happens.
Thank you very much!

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