No More facebook accounts tied to your Quest!
The day has finally come, well almost, starting in August you will no longer need a facebook account to use a quest VR device.
Zuckerberg and Meta announced today they will begin rolling out Meta accounts, a new way for people to log in to their headset that doesn’t require a facebook account. Once you make a meta account you’ll also need to create a Meta Horizon profile aka a social profile in VR. THis sorta sounds like a facebook account right? Well I’ll get to that in a minute along with the new privacy settings that will be implemented.
For those of us that already have accounts that are tied to a facebook or have an old school oculus account that you had to merge with facebook you can choose to remove your facebook account during the setup process. But do know you will still need to create both a meta account and a horizon profile before being forced to on January 1st 2023 to continue using your Quest. So Happy early New Years!
As stated on meta’s blog your meta account is not a social media profile. Its a little confusing but just remember your meta Account is separate from your meta Horizon profile. The meta account is specifically for logging into your VR devices, and viewing and managing your purchases inside Meta the app store. Meta does have plans in the future to extend the account function so you can use it to login to other furter meta devices. Hmm I wonder what those could be…
Of course you can connect your meta account to your instagram or if you don’t care facebook to gain access to connected experiences like finding your friends on those platforms to play vr games with. Again this connection is optional.
Now on to your Meta horizon profile. Once you finish setting up your meta account you’ll be asked to set one of these up which is a social profile that can be accessed not only in vr but also on the web. #metaverse here we come. Inside your profile you can customize your appearance and username which thankfully doesn’t have to be your real name which will be displayed to others while you are VR. From here your oculus friends then become your followers like instagram with meta claiming this provides more ways of being social and connecting with others. You can then choose to share activity updates, achievements etc with your followers. By default if you already own a quest headset your oculus friends will automatically become your followers and you’ll be following them back. But you can choose to unfollow or remove anyone at anytime.
Looking to the privacy settings, meta accounts will give you the options of your profile being open to everyone, friends and family which gives you control to connect only with people you know, and where only the people that now follow you can see your activity and active status, or go Solo where people cannot see your activity or status and you’ll be asked to approve every follower requests. But even choosing the private solo option your profile picture, avatar, username, display name, follower count and number of people you follow will be publicly visible.
With these new meta horizon profiles we have seen what seems to be confirmation of new avatar images inside the past few meta quest firmware updates And believe it or not… they have legs!!
Lastly I’ll leave you with this bit of Project Cambria news. It seems Meta is going to take the apple approach and has decided to name project cambria the Quest Pro. Mac Rumor writer and iOS code digger Steve Moser found a string in the latest ios Quest app referencing pairing a new controller that reads, Pair Meta Quest Pro right controller.
We soon will be free from facebook accounts attached to our quest. Let me know what you think about this if you care or will still keep your facebook connected to your new meta account. Thanks for watching and I’ll catch you in the next quickie.