It will soon no longer be necessary to connect to a Facebook account to use the Quest 2 virtual reality headset. From August 2022, the connection will be made with a Meta account, separate from the company’s flagship social network.
The promise will be kept. As announced at the October 2021 Facebook Connect conference, it will soon no longer be necessary to log in to a Facebook account to activate the Quest 2 virtual reality headset and make purchases on the Quest Store. A change made possible by the induction, from August 2022, of new Meta accounts, which will not be intrinsically linked to any of the “traditional” social networks of Mark Zuckerberg’s company.
Users who connected to their headset via a Facebook account will thus be invited, as soon as the change is made, to create a Meta account, on which they can repatriate all the data from their previous account (including their purchases of applications and other content ). Those who still use an Oculus Account opened during the Oculus Rift, Rift S or Quest 1 era today will be able to continue using it until January 1, 2023, after which they too will have to make the switch. – but at least without going through the Facebook box.
These new accounts will not depart from any social dimension, however, as they will have to be accompanied by a Meta Horizon profile – the name of the platform that Meta sees as the centerpiece of its vision of the metaverse. A virtual universe in which everyone will be identified by a personalized avatar, and in which links will be forged through a mechanism of subscriptions (“follows”), on the model of Instagram, instead of the system of friends currently in place. works in the Oculus interface. What’s more, users who so wish will still be able to link their Meta account and their Facebook and/or Instagram profiles, in order to find their contacts from the “real” world more easily in virtual reality.
A very partial response to the initial discontent of users
This change is a priori welcome, but nevertheless gives the impression of being only a sham, responding only very marginally to the grumbling that users had expressed when the obligation to use an account Facebook had originally been announced. At best, this new system will make it possible to decorrelate the use of a VR headset from submission to Facebook’s terms of use, and in particular the obligation to register under one’s real name.
On the other hand, the fact that these new accounts are, if only by name, to be considered as accounts encompassing all the services of the American company, clearly indicates that they constitute the new focal point on which Meta wants to gather all advertising targeting data it has on its users. We are therefore far from what the authors of the discontent would have wished for, namely an account truly detached from Meta’s other activities, and devoted exclusively to the very specific use of virtual reality in its current form — and not in its future (and very hypothetical) “metaverse” version.