In another one of his Instagram AMAs, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth discussed the status of Virtual Desktop’s pending App Lab submission and the requirements surrounding Oculus Store content.
Bosworth acknowledged the Virtual Desktop submission is still pending, but expanded a bit more on the context behind Oculus Store content.
Here’s a full transcription of what he said in response to a question on the status of Virtual Desktop’s App Lab submission:
“Yeah as you probably heard from Guy on Twitter, they’ve submitted the app for review. I actually don’t know the status of it yet but that’s still kind of ongoing so I don’t know that. But I do want to take this opportunity to address the broader thinking behind the store and App Lab and restrictions there.
Virtual reality is new and we want to take it mainstream. What we found is that people would try virtual reality once and if they had a bad experience, they would not be so easy to get back and try it again. So it was very important to us that when people tried virtual reality in Quest, they had a great experience.
I would say our approach appears to have paid off. Certainly relative to Go or Gear VR, we’re seeing a lot more return customers. Of course, it’s a better product, but it has a real cost – that means a lot of developers who had great content (which is doing very well, for example, on SideQuest) didn’t make it into the store, which sucks.
Developers are our life blood so, obviously having had a success, we feel like we’re in a good position with consumers [and] breaking mainstream, we’re now trying to release those constraints that we put in place, and the App Lab is just the first step in that path.
To bring this full circle, one of the challenges with Virtual Desktop is that we can’t know what your wi-fi connection is like or how it changes, and so we couldn’t guarantee a good experience, and that was why we had limitations on apps like this shipping in the store.”
While Virtual Desktop is available on the Oculus Store, a patch can be applied through sideloading and SideQuest that allows users with a strong local wi-fi connection to play PC VR games wirelessly on their Quest. Developer Guy Godin has submitted this version of the app for App Lab approval, which would significantly lower the difficulty of installing the patch for users.
Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Facebook Reality Labs, provided an update on Quest game and app revenue via Twitter, noting that over 60 titles had now surpassed $1 million in revenue.
Facebook doesn’t release statistics such as units sold for its headsets like the Oculus Quest, which can sometimes make growth hard to quantify. However, there are some other statistics that do help provide some context to the Quest’s increasing popularity, retention and growth in lieu of those other hard numbers. One of those is the number of Quest titles that have surpassed $1 million in revenue on the platform, which Facebook has provided some updates on.
Today, just 4 months later, the number has almost doubled again — Bosworth announced on Twitter that over 60 Oculus Quest titles have surpassed $1 million in revenue on the Quest platform. That’s roughly 30% of all apps in the store.
We're thrilled to see that developers of all sizes are seeing continued success on the Quest platform: More than 60 Oculus titles are generating revenue in the millions, nearly twice from when we updated this number a few months ago at Connect.
The update comes on the same day as Facebook’s Q4 2020 earnings call with investors. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg offered strong comments indicating that the Quest 2 is “on track to be the first mainstream virtual reality headset.” You can read more of his comments here.
The other main takeaway from the earnings call was that Facebooks’ ‘Other’ revenue more than doubled from $346 million in Q4 2019 to $885 million in Q4 2020. While the category does not solely consist of Quest hardware — it also includes other non-advertising revenue and hardware such as Portal devices – executives indicated that much of this growth was driven by strong Quest 2 holiday sales.
In another Instagram AMA, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook suggested that the launch of the new unlisted app distribution method for Oculus Quest is likely to release very soon.
Bosworth frequently hosts Instagram AMAs (ask-me-anything), where followers can submit questions that he responds to with a recorded response on his Instagram story. One of the first questions was about the release timeline for the new method of unlisted app distribution for Oculus Quest, which was announced at Facebook Connect last September. Bosworth said that the feature was meant to launch last week, but had to be pushed back because of a bug.
Here’s his full response:
Question: What’s the ETA on the new Quest distribution method?
Bosworth: [Laughing] At the risk of infuriating people, I’ll say… sooner than you think. No, it’s really soon. Really, really quite soon. It was almost this week, but we had a little bit of a bug, so we gotta fix that and then it’s out.
Bosworth also answered a few other Quest-related topics, such as plans for social features and Infinite Office.
In response to a question about whether users will ever be able to have friends in their Quest home environment, Boz said that the team still internally iterating on ways to make VR more social. He said that “going to a place” with friends in VR and playing multiplayer games together is great, but that there’s “more to it” and that he thinks “the shell [the Quest Home environment] can be part of that.”
Bosworth also said that Venues will open up more ways to hang with friends, and that it’s “part of a much bigger picture we’re building with Horizon and the shell, and around media and shared games.”
In regards to a question about a beta release of Infinite Office, he said it’s “not as soon as you think” and that they are testing it internally but “it’s just not ready yet, there’s still kind of a ways to go there.”
Facebook’s Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality, Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, made some comments related to reports that Apple is producing a VR headset, stating that it would be ‘good for consumers’ but also giving some skepticism about what the content of the headset would be.
Last week, a new report from Bloomberg indicated that Apple is working on a high-end standalone headset that is “mostly virtual reality” with some limited AR features. The report indicated that the device is still in the prototype phase but could be far more expensive than Facebook’s $299 Oculus Quest and would use the company’s latest chips and feature a “much higher-resolution” display than current headsets. You can read more here.
In his latest Instagram AMA, one user asked Bosworth what his thoughts were on the Apple VR/AR standalone headset. Here’s his full response:
“Not really, and I don’t meant to be glib about it, I’d love to have more people putting more VR headsets out there, it’s good for consumers. I’m a little skeptical if that’s really what Apple is going to do, given I don’t know where their content is going to come from, but you know, they’re great so I hope they do.
I will say, I just don’t run my team based on what competition is doing, my team will tell you that. They ask about stuff and I say listen, the number one thing that’s going to cause us to fail is us not executing well, so we try to focus on what we think we can do, and what’s out there and learn and iterate.”
Someone also asked Bosworth whether he could give any “juicy details” on the feature set of Facebook’s upcoming smart glasses, produced in partnership with Ray-Ban, to which he simply responded, “Nice try.”
In regards to a question about whether the “ideal form factor” of a VR headset might be impossible to achieve, Bosworth said he thinks it’s still “workable on some timeline” and that “candidly, right now we’re in a tight trade off between cost, weight, power, brightness, resolution, field of view, but over time we are going to continue to find ways to ease that.”
One question also asked what people who are “bearish on VR are missing or misunderstanding.” Bosworth said he wants “to go easy on people here.”
“VR hasn’t hit the mainstream yet, articles that say that are accurate right now,” he said. “We think it’s about to, we think the technology is there, but we gotta prove that, so I’m not impatient with that. We’ll get to them.”
Facebook Reality Labs head Andrew Bosworth released an internal memo, entitled “The Big Shift,” which underlines why the company needs to start building products now that better balance user privacy and user experience.
Even before Facebook moved to require all new Oculus users to sign in with Facebook, Oculus headset users were rightfully worried about the company’s treatment of user privacy. Facebook has a long track record of privacy scandals, including the Cambridge Analytic debacle, mass surveillance, and the amplification of misinformation (aka ‘fake news’). There’s more, but the list is comically long.
Virtual and augmented reality opens new, more intimate windows into user behavior though, with biometrical data obtained from VR/AR devices offering important vectors for understanding what makes each individual tick. It’s a treasure trove of user data which has largely gone untapped (and unleaked, as far as we know), but it won’t always be that way.
Now, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook’s AR/VR Reality Labs team, is calling on his colleagues to put user privacy at the core of its products. The ‘Big Shift’ memo, seen in part below, was obtained by Big Technology, and first reported by OneZero.
“Starting in January we are changing the way we approach product development in FRL. Instead of imagining a product and trimming it down to fit modern standards of data privacy and security we are going to invert our process. We will start with the assumption that we can’t collect, use, or store any data. The burden is on us to demonstrate why certain data is truly required for the product to work. Even then I want us to scope it as aggressively as we can, holding a higher bar for sending data to the server than we do for processing it locally. I have no problem with us giving users options to share more if they choose (opt-in) but by default we shouldn’t expect it.”
In the memo, which was released December 22nd, Bosworth says he doesn’t simply aim to meet today’s expectations for user privacy, but wants to “differentiate our products on the basis of privacy. Let other companies scramble to keep up with us.”
Andrew Bosworth | Image courtesy Facebook
Bosworth, a 15-year Facebook veteran, first joined Microsoft in 2004; it wasn’t the same Microsoft we know today, but it was changing to prioritize user security in the face of a long history of ostensibly leaving virus and malware protection for third parties to sort out. Bosworth says in the memo it was due to “decades of buffer overruns and unchecked dereferences in a sprawling code base.”
After his one and a half year-stint as a software designer at Microsoft, Bosworth says public criticism pushed the company to reprioritize security, which helped make it the trusted leader in the field as it is today.
“Today Microsoft is considered perhaps the most trustworthy software vendor in the world. It is trusted by an overwhelming majority of enterprise companies. Having been on the outside since 2005 it was impressive to watch their persistence yield a gradual but definitive shift in their reputation. I think this is a model for us at Facebook. We should become the undisputed leaders in providing privacy aware software.”
Bosworth disagrees with the view that Facebook doesn’t care about balancing privacy and user experience, but he says that due to a recent shift in public sentiment, the company must “consider the consumer experience holistically rather than at optimizing for each individual feature.”
Facebook now offers a new set of privacy functions which reveals what data the company is collecting when you use its VR devices. That’s moving in the right direction, however it’s clear the company as a whole still isn’t working on the same wavelength. This month alone Facebook has faced a major backlash due to its mishandling of WhatsApp user privacy.
“The next step is for the priority of privacy to permeate the entirety of our culture, we’ve made inroads here but we have a long ways to go. Privacy Review should become a simple housekeeping exercise unless we detect further shifts in public attitudes towards privacy.”
Whether it was intentional or not, Bosworth’s memo strikes at the heart of the matter: companies of size simply don’t act in your best interests when given free reign, and users need to prioritize privacy over user experience if they want to push entities like Facebook in that direction. It’s supposed to be a ‘Big Shift’ in the way Facebook currently operates, and we can see why.
“With new culture and new tools, [and] a concerted effort to revisit old products, we are on a long road to redemption. We shouldn’t expect any credit before it is due and perhaps not even until a good while afterwards. But we should nonetheless feel proud of the shift we are undertaking and confident in our ability to see it through.”
Facebook declined OneZero’s request to comment on the contents of the memo.
We’ve included the majority of ‘The Big Shift’ in this piece. You can check out the whole, unedited version here.
A pair of notes written by the head of Facebook Reality Labs — Andrew Bosworth — and published internally to company employees provide a look into Facebook’s approach to privacy heading into 2021.
The notes were first made public by Alex Kantrowitz and UploadVR independently confirmed them as authentic. The contents are of significant interest to our readers so we are publishing them in full below:
Andrew Bosworth To Facebook Reality Labs:
Starting in January we are changing the way we approach product development in FRL. Instead of imagining a product and trimming it down to fit modern standards of data privacy and security we are going to invert our process. We will start with the assumption that we can’t collect, use, or store any data. The burden is on us to demonstrate why certain data is truly required for the product to work. Even then I want us to scope it as aggressively as we can, holding a higher bar for sending data to the server than we do for processing it locally. I have no problem with us giving users options to share more if they choose (opt-in) but by default we shouldn’t expect it.
I don’t want us to just meet the consumer expectations for privacy today. I want us to differentiate our products on the basis of privacy. Let other companies scramble to keep up with us.
Andrew Bosworth’s “The Big Shift”:
When I joined Microsoft in 2004, the only required reading was Writing Secure Code. The company had spent years getting dragged through the mud for the viruses prevalent on their platforms. While relatively few consumers faced material negative impact from malware, the possibility of it was a constant. Getting a glance at the codebase, I could see why. They had built up decades of buffer overruns and unchecked dereferences in a sprawling code base.
I sometimes wonder if Microsoft engineers before me felt the coverage of their company was unfair. Perhaps they felt that too much attention was being paid to relatively rare issues. Perhaps the trade-offs they had made enabled huge ecosystems of developers who might otherwise struggle. If that was the case, it didn’t matter. Consumers didn’t feel safe using Microsoft products.
By the time I joined the quality of new code impressive. Security got more attention than anything else in code reviews. Even the most junior engineer like me was held to the highest standards. They made product decisions that in many ways made their user experience worse but in exchange (rightly) gave consumers’ confidence that the system they were using was trustworthy.
Today Microsoft is considered perhaps the most trustworthy software vendor in the world. It is trusted by an overwhelming majority of enterprise companies. Having been on the outside since 2005 it was impressive to watch their persistence yield a gradual but definitive shift in their reputation. I think this is a model for us at Facebook. We should become the undisputed leaders in providing privacy aware software.
As it did at Microsoft, this starts with an acknowledgement that the way we operated for a long time is no longer the best way to serve those who use our products. We have always put the best consumer experience first. That meant the best ranking, the best content, and the best sharing tools. Contrary to what is often written we have always cared about privacy and balanced providing people with both a good privacy experience and a good user experience. But global sentiment has clearly shifted to the point that people are willing to accept sacrifices in the quality of the product in ways we hadn’t considered in order to have stronger guarantees around data privacy. We need to consider the consumer experience holistically rather than at optimizing for each individual feature.
The good news is that this next phase of our journey is underway. It started gradually a long time ago and then suddenly in mid-2019 when we clearly put privacy first internally and redesigned the Privacy Review process to provide just such a holistic view of our products. Privacy Review is an effective backstop but is still having to escalate far too often as local teams haven’t yet internalized the magnitude of the shift we are undergoing. The next step is for the priority of privacy to permeate the entirety of our culture, we’ve made inroads here but we have a long ways to go. Privacy Review should become a simple housekeeping exercise unless we detect further shifts in public attitudes towards privacy.
Of course we are also building tools to make this easier. Just as Microsoft deployed fuzzing to test every input, we will build tools that make it easier to write good code and harder to write bad code. But the tools will only be effective insofar as we stop fighting them at the cultural level. The new normal is giving people choices about data usage and finding ways to provide the best value we can when data isn’t available.
With new culture and new tools, an a concerted effort to revisit old products, we are on a long road to redemption. We shouldn’t expect any credit before it is due and perhaps not even until a good while afterwards. But we should nonetheless feel proud of the shift we are undertaking and confident in our ability to see it through.
In a new blog post, Andrew Bosworth, Head of Facebook Reality Labs – who has held AMA’s via Instagram recently – said that: “Oculus Quest 2 is our fastest-growing VR headset, thanks to the convergence of leading VR form factors and the content built by our developer community.” He went onto say: “Quest 2 surpassed the original Quest’s monthly active people in less than 7 weeks.”
As usual, Facebook hasn’t released any actual figures so there’s no way of telling how many this actually is. Bosworth did go onto say: “more people are using it to stay fit, play games with friends, and collaborate for work…with more women using Quest 2 than any of our previous headsets.”
He doesn’t just look back over the last three months, revealing a few things to expect during 2021. “We’ll offer more options and control over how to show up in VR, including persona and privacy controls,” Bosman adds, all part of the big Facebook account login furore which saw the end of Oculus accounts.
Currently available as an invite-only beta, Facebook Horizon was also mentioned, indicating the social platform will see its official release in 2021. It was debuted during Oculus Connect 6 (OC6) in 2019 and since the beta launched early last year those early testers have been building content so that new users have got places to explore before they start creating their own worlds.
With pandemic lockdowns mostly continuing into the near future, online social and work interactions are going be even more essential than ever, of which Oculus Quest 2 and Facebook Horizon will play an important part. For further updates from Facebook Reality Labs, keep reading VRFocus.
The head of Facebook’s efforts in VR and AR wrote that there’s “no looking back” after the pandemic year of 2020 and his team’s “conviction in the work we do has only grown.”
“Quest 2 surpassed the original Quest’s monthly active people in less than 7 weeks, and more people are using it to stay fit, play games with friends, and collaborate for work,” Andrew Bosworth wrote in the blog post dated January 6, 2021. “There has never been a better time to get in the lab and build products that deliver meaningful social presence, and to do so in a responsible, privacy-centric way.”
The post seems to be designed as both a rallying cry to those within Facebook and a reiteration of policies the company opted to pursue in 2020, like the policy which requires a Facebook account representing your real identity be used with all Oculus gear going forward.
“We also implemented some product changes that were key in giving people a better, safer experience in VR — starting with introducing a single way to log into Oculus using your Facebook account, which makes it easier for them to find, connect, and play with friends in VR. This allows us to deliver multiplayer and social experiences and stronger privacy and security measures. In 2021, we’ll offer more options and control over how to show up in VR, including persona and privacy controls.”
In 2021, Bosworth writes that Facebook will “take steps to make immersive experiences more social with Facebook Horizon. And as the office concept evolves, we’re building out our capacity for meaningful social presence in virtual work spaces.”
The post also says Facebook’s first smart glasses from Ray-Ban “will arrive sooner than later” as the company focuses on building out a platform for AR.
Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook did another Instagram AMA this week, hinting that Quest 2 users will soon be able to gift games to friends and enable 90Hz mode across the entire headset.
Only a few weeks ago, Boz did a similar Instagram AMA where he responded to the issue of account suspensions on Quest 2, saying that users should make sure their Facebook accounts are in ‘good standing’ before buying a headset. A month later, Boz has given some equally interesting tidbits in a new Instagram AMA.
One user asked Boz when we can expect full 90Hz mode for Quest 2, to which he simply responded “sooner than you think.” Currently, Quest 2 only supports 90Hz as an experimental mode for certain areas like the Quest home environment, and not games. However, there is a workaround to enable it for games right now if you want to. That being said, it doesn’t sound like we’ll be waiting too long for the official update to drop anyway.
He also had a similar response to a user who asked why they can’t gift Oculus Store games to their Oculus friends — “stay tuned, also sooner than you think.” One of the biggest criticisms of the Oculus Store recently has been the inability to buy gift cards for others, or to purchase giftable games that can be sent to people on your friends list. We have reached out to Facebook for any further details on game gifting, and will update this post if we hear back.
Boz also said talked about a wireless version of Oculus Link, which “is something we want to get to for sure, [but] we want to get it right though. We want it to be good quality. But in the meantime, if you want to get a little early access, go download Virtual Desktop and get on SideQuest and you can give it a shot right away.” Of course, Boz is referring to the patched version of Virtual Desktop that can be sideloaded onto a Quest from SideQuest, allowing you to play wireless PC VR content on a Quest 2 when connected to a VR-ready PC. If you’re interested, check out our how to guide on the topic.
In regards to Passthrough API availability, Boz also had quite a bit to say. “I am super excited about Passthrough and the promise it has to let us move beyond virtual reality into a more mixed reality scenario. But it’s also a very tricky set of work to get right, and to fit it into the compute envelopes that we have, so it’s a little slow right now.”
You can watch the full AMA over on Boz’s Instagram profile, @boztank.
Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Facebook, did a video AMA on his Instagram and provided a response to a question about users with problems accessing Facebook accounts, therefore limiting access to a Quest 2 which requires its use.
New Oculus Quest 2 owners can log in with Facebook, or existing Oculus users can merge their Facebook account with their Oculus one. Facebook hasn’t said specifically how many buyers have been affected by log in issues, stating that it is a “small number”.
In his Instagram AMA, Boz responded to a question from Benjamin Bega regarding reports that some users who create a new Facebook account, or re-activate a very old account, to use an Oculus Quest 2 are getting their accounts quickly suspended.
Here’s the full question and response, transcribed:
Question: Any word on people getting their Facebook accounts banned, making quest useless?
Boz: Yeah of course, we’ve been tracking this from day one really closely, following up with every single individual case that comes across.
The number of cases isn’t large, but of course the impact is huge on those people and we take that really seriously. Every single person in VR matters to us.
So I mean I think people should continue to make sure their Facebook accounts are in good standingbefore they buy the headset. They can work through those problems before they do it.
And second of all is we are working really quickly through those and resolving all those issues that come up. There are Facebook account issues that can be solved and we’re working through them.
But I want to point out this is very common – Google, Apple, Xbox, pick a favorite. They make you sign in with an account and there’s a reason for that. We get to provide better services that way and stronger guarantees around things like data security, and compliance with regulations. So I’m a big fan of this move, even still.
