The poor Oculus Go ultimately caught a break. Right after getting sidelined by the remarkable Oculus Quest, and then canceled altogether, Facebook just may possibly give it a new lease on daily life. In accordance to Oculus’ Consulting CTO John Carmack, Fb will unlock the Go’s bootloader.
The Oculus Go is admittedly a small-run VR headset. It can only monitor 1 controller, and can not operate games as complicated as the Quest. It is improved at movie viewing than interaction. But it is however an interesting gadget, that unfortunately observed its times shortened by the start of the Quest.
Beneath the hood, the Go runs on Android. With an unlocked bootloader, tinkerers could load just about everything onto the components. At minimum something the components could feasibly run. Just like unlocking the bootloader enables anybody to load a customized ROM on an Android mobile phone, you could do the same on the Go. And improved still, that suggests if you occur to obtain a utilized (or by no means opened) Go a long time from now you could get it completely up to day even if the above-the-air servers are absent.
As initial spotted by The Verge, Carmack built the announcement on Twitter:
Something I have been pushing on for decades is likely to come to move shortly:
We are going to make available an unlocked OS develop for the Oculus Go headset that can be facet loaded to get whole root obtain.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) September 24, 2021
What isn’t obvious still is how shortly the unlocked bootloader update will get there. Or how accurately it will be shipped. But Carmack did counsel that this could established the precedent for unlocking other units in the long run. Possibly we’ll see the same procedure sometime for the unique Oculus Quest. It’s better than devices in a landfill.
by way of The Verge