I like my Oculus Rift. But the software is so bad. It is confusing, after a month not using it, I don't know where each setting is. Sometimes I misconfigure, and there is no easy way to reset it and move everything into view again. Hardware is fine for my needs (playing Alyx), but the software looks like somthing bought from seven sources and glued together.
It's gone through so much reshuffling and clearly been kicked around internally between managers/PMs.
The earlier versions were much easier to use and the later ones can become quite a nightmare to setup navigating the oculus/meta/facebook account silliness then ultimately it all feels a lot jankier than very early versions of the software both in Rift and Quest respectively.
Think if Zuck believes in this going forwards it would be wise to focus on removing some of this platform bureaucracy friction, took me 15-20 minutes to get my Quest up and running and logged in after not using it for 18 months.
Yeah it's wildly, embarrassingly bad - to such a point it feels like Zuck must not be using it. Maybe most of his attention is on the AI stuff and the Ray Bans?
There's a ton of half-baked old ideas in the UI, it's extremely confusing. Even basic stuff like trying to add my dad as a friend is super hard to do.
Literally every person I've helped set it up has also had to do a full manual restore (holding down hardware buttons to reset from a boot menu) because they app fails to connect during initial setup or there's some bug with adding payment.
Someone really needs to go into that team and rip lots of stuff out.
Their touch controllers and basic UI navigation are good though.
Attaching a computer-tethered VR display should be as much of a non-event as plugging in a monitor. The Rift’s software experience is so unnecessarily sad.
Did Mark Zuckerberg ever actually use it? I felt like it got shitty after John Carmack left FB. I don't think he was direct in the UI side much (more like increasing framerate in software updates) but I got the sense that as VR CTO or whatever he was able to say "Hey — what, come on, fuck that shit get rid of it" but now there is nobody to do that job.
Is there something inherently difficult or novel about VR operating software that would make it difficult to design or implement controls? I can understand tracking hands is difficult, but I mean the problems you have.
It seems crazy that after investing so much in the 'hard part', the VR hardware and software itself, they'd drop the ball on what seems mundane - basic design of UI controls.
No I don't think so. They just miss the Apple attitude of UI.
It's like the Windows setting system. I'm using Win11/WSL, and while it works, the Windows settings are a mixture of Win95/Aero/3rd Party Plugins (Nvidia)/Win11 and some things that just look like Win3.1.
Googling to change DNS settings:
Step 1: Open the Control Panel. ...
Step 2: Open Network and Sharing Center. ...
Step 3: Choose the connection. ...
Step 4: Change adapter settings. ...
Step 5: Choose Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) ...
Step 6: Click on Properties. ...
Yep. Microsoft has taken a lot of effort in the last two years to empty out Control Panel and get everything into Settings, along with unifying everything into the Win11 Fluent (or whatever it is called these days) style.
To be honest, in a lot of cases when you need “Advanced $ Settings” it still kicks you into the old Control Panel-style pop-up windows, but at least it’s almost all in one place now.
Let's not give them credit for having two subsystems called 'control panel' and 'settings'. That it happened even once is an embarassment, and I think they started that with Windows 8.
That is indeed when it is started, but that's the one and only time - it's just that this transition is still ongoing, after 11 years. By now everything that a casual user might need is in the "new" settings, and much of the advanced stuff is as well, but it's not complete.
Have they finally unfucked the settings and brought them all into a consistent ui, or have they just moved that particular one to yet another new layer?
It’s a new UI paradigm, not just a new UI toolkit or something like that. I think those are quite difficult, I can only think of like 4 in the computer space: text & terminals, windows mouse and keyboard, menu driven (consoles & cable boxes), and smartphone.
We don’t come up with totally new ways to interact with our computers often. And Facebook has never stood out for their UI brilliance.
