Soon VR fans will no longer need to have a Facebook account in order to use Oculus Quest 2 headsets.
The news came as Facebook – the parent company of the titular social media platform and owner of Oculus – officially rebranded itself as Meta at this year’s Facebook Connect event, as it focuses on moving from being a social media company to becoming a “metaverse” company.
As both VR and AR are major components that will bring about this reality, the company is looking to shake up how it operates VR. During the Connect live stream yesterday (October 28), Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the company is “working on making it so you can log in into Quest with an account other than your personal Facebook account”, adding that tests involving select accounts will begin soon before being fully implemented “within the next year”.
It was also announced that the Oculus Quest headsets would also be rebranded as Meta Quest, with CTO Andrew Bosworth confirming that the Oculus branding will be phased out.
While pitched as a wireless and accessible VR headset, one of the most divisive aspects of Oculus Quest 2 has been the requirement for a Facebook account to log in. That didn’t stop a 17-year-old hacker creating a piece of software that can remove Facebook from the headset, albeit with considerable loss of functionality.
The issue of depending on Facebook login to use Oculus Quest 2 also came to a head after a Facebook outage earlier this month, which lasted six hours and temporarily turned the £300 headset into a paperweight as users found themselves unable to access their VR games.
The outage also affected the company’s other services including Instagram and WhatsApp, since they also rely on Facebook’s servers.
Elsewhere, Call Of Duty: Warzone is getting its new Pacific-themed map Caldera in December, coinciding with the start of Season One for Call Of Duty: Vanguard.
The post Oculus Quest 2 headsets won’t need Facebook logins in the future appeared first on NME.
