Meta’s PC VR Users Evicted from Oculus Homes
Meta has evicted PC VR users from their customized Oculus Home with many users now ruing losing virtual homes that they have spent years building. The affected users have been sharing the images of their lost digital spaces which are now gone forever.
Meta has terminated Oculus Home support for the Oculus App in all PC VR headsets. A new update has gotten rid of access to the customization features and cut off users from their current home environments.
The Oculus Home has been the default home environment for PC VR, including on Oculus Rift, Rift S as well as on Meta Quest headset via Link.
Oculus Home enabled users to create and customize their own virtual home environment using various highly customizable options for furniture, decoration, and interior design. Users could also collect items granted by other PC VR games and apps which they could subsequently display in Oculus Home.
they removed all of the binaries without even warning people that they'd get evicted, worst landlord ever.
on another note, they killed the servers entirely i think. you just load into a white void now with nothing happening, can't even get your home anymore.
— Kaitlyn (@BunniKaitlyn) May 21, 2023
Many users on Reddit and Twitter reported that Meta has been gradually limiting access to Oculus Home along with updates in its Oculus Desktop App for PC over the past few months. Other users on Reddit noted that the reinstallation of the software temporarily reinstated access.
However, a recent update to the desktop app generated a new set of reports from users who reported that they no longer had any access to Oculus Home and that there were no workarounds for reinstating the feature.
A Reddit user u/noobdude752 contacted Meta support to find more information on the state of Oculus Home and reported that a support agent told them that Meta had “stopped supporting the older Oculus Home experience within the Rift software” and that the company was hoping to bring “some of Oculus Home’s features into the future.”
Oculus Home was initially only a static environment. However, an overhaul of the app in 2017 brought in support for custom environments as well as a host of other customization options.
Over time, Meta has been gradually winding down the features and support for Oculus Home following a shift in focus to the standalone Quest headsets. Oculus Home is just the latest of the VR services to be sunsetted after Oculus Rooms and Facebook Spaces.
However, the company still invests in its Quest Link PC VR connection, though. It released the USB dongle with D-Link and has partnered with Intel in a Wi-Fi chip that is optimized for PC VR streaming. However, the native PC VR interface for Quest that it promised in 2020 is still far from being realized.
Meta’s Quest headsets have never provided support for the same level of environment customization that you’d get with the Oculus Home on PC.
The latest Quest home environments iteration is called Horizon Home and has been the company’s latest attempt to stitch together a cohesive Quest offering after a host of abandoned features as well as services on its Rift platform for PC. Horizon Home doesn’t provide much customization options beyond the ability to swap 360-degree panoramas in the home environments.
Horizon Home on Quest currently provides limited support for virtual social gatherings and it also enables users to switch between sets of predetermined home environments.
Quest’s Horizon Home doesn’t offer anything close to Oculus Home’s fine-tuned environment personalization and customizations. In October 2021, the then Facebook announced that it would add the ability to build and customize “in the future.” The latest Quest update features some customization options for Horizon Home that allow users to set the skybox outside the predetermined home environments.
Below is a look at some of the now-lost Oculus Homes:-
