TECH NEWS – A 17-year-old programmer has found a cure for the Oculus Quest 2, but due to over-integration with Facebook, we’ll have to do without several features if we try this solution…

We wrote earlier this week about how Facebook’s outage dragged Messenger, Whatsapp, Instagram and even a significant portion of Oculus headsets with it. A Facebook registration is slowly becoming mandatory for Oculus’ headsets, and as the site has become inaccessible, these VR devices have also been floored; especially the Oculus Quest 2: no Facebook account (or access to one), no Oculus Store access.

But a seventeen year old coder got fed up and created Oculess, which can be found on Github. This allows you to disconnect your Oculus Quest 2 VR headset from your Facebook account, but to sideload, you need to have Developer Mode available on your device. To do this, we need to provide a phone number or a payment method to Facebook, which, although it doesn’t cost us anything, doesn’t sound so positive…

But once that’s done, you can sideload from, for example, SideQuestVR, where you don’t need a Facebook registration to use or access it. The hand tracking is not affected, so Half-Life: Alyx, for example, will still be completely normal to use, but we mentioned for a good reason at the beginning that disconnecting from Facebook has its drawbacks: you will lose access to the Oculus Store, the Oculus Browser, Oculus TV, casting will not work, some apps downloaded from the Oculus Store will also stop functioning (for permissions reasons), and you will have to give up on all Facebook social features. However, Basti564 has also thought of this, as he lists several alternatives to these. Click here to read about it.

What is the lesson here? The fact that Facebook is too centralised and what Mark Zuckerberg said (his company is not solely for profit) is absolute nonsense. However, if their whole system breaks down again, you can still play VR with Oculess…

Source: PCGamer