A 17-year outdated coder discovered a approach to unlink your Fb account out of your Oculus Quest 2 headset

By On Oct 7, 2021

Earlier this week, a massive outage crippled Facebook and related services for most of the day. During the outage, anyone who wanted to use their Oculus Quest 2 had to pause their VR adventures as they need to be logged into a Facebook account to use the headset or access the Oculus Store. If Facebook goes down, the headset will become a $ 300 sci-fi prop.

Some people (myself included) are always looking for ways to bypass the Quest’s Facebook requirements for such occasions, or so that we can delete our Facebook accounts and keep using our headsets. Enter a 17 year old programmer who created an interesting way to get around the requirement.

Oculess is a sideloadable tool that will unlink your Facebook account from your Quest 2 VR headset (thanks to UploadVR for finding it). To sideload anything on Quest 2, you’ll need to access Developer Mode on the device, which requires a phone number or payment details (which you won’t be billed) for Facebook review.

Once that’s set up, it’s the last time you have to deal with Facebook on your headset. From here, you can sideload apps from places like SideQuestVR that don’t require you to have a Facebook account to access and access. The important thing is that the hand tracking remains untouched so that you can easily play your favorite VR games like Half-Life Alyx.

There is a downside to disconnecting Facebook from the headset entirely. There are some features that you just can’t use, such as:

Oculus store
Oculus browser
Oculus television
to water
Certain apps downloaded from the Oculus Store due to permission issues
All the social media functions of Facebook

Fortunately, the developer of Oculess has published a list of alternative software that you can download from the site to fill in these functional gaps.

Given how people think of Facebook these days, it’s not surprising that some VR gamers are looking for a way to play without having anything to do with the social media giant.

You can download Oculess right here if you want to try it out for yourself. The tool’s creator, Bastian, also has a helpful video tutorial to walk you through the process.