With the success of Facebook’s Oculus Quest platform, it’s easy to forget their other endeavours in the market such as the PC only Rift and 3 degree of freedom (DOF) Go headset. The Oculus Go came out in 2018 as a basic VR viewer, akin to Google’s cardboard platform in that it had no positional tracking and could only do rotational movements. With its discontinuation last year, John Carmak, current consulting CTO for Oculus, has authorized full access to Oculus Go devices.
This full access allows developers to fully bypass any software login checks that may no longer work in the future as well as the ability to run any applications they want on the now legacy device. With no more official support from Facebook, users wanting to extend the life of their device can now do so with full reign over the device’s functionality. “This opens up the ability to repurpose the hardware for more things today, and means that a randomly discovered shrink-wrapped headset twenty years from now will be able to update to the final software version, long after over-the-air update servers have been shut down.”
In a series of tweets from Carmak during his announcement he stated, “I hope this is a precedent for when headsets go unsupported in the future, but damn, getting all the necessary permissions for this involved SO much more effort that you would expect.” Carmak, founder of id software before his endeavors at Oculus, has long been open to developers such as giving the source code to his first few games away and a strong advocate for open-source software. With strict integration with Facebook services that current and future Oculus devices have (all of which are inoperable if Facebook servers were to ever go down), it’s reassuring that Carmak’s vision of openness is still viable underneath Facebook’s rule over Oculus. “Legal wasn’t problematic — FB lawyers are surprisingly cool about a lot of efforts that you might expect pushback on.” With the pace VR is going at, being able to repurpose older devices can help bring more VR access to the public and reduce the electronic waste we create. Users looking to try out the unlocked software for the Oculus Go can do so on their website.
