Oculus Reverses DRM Course After Public Backlash

from the power-to-the-vr-people dept

Weeks back, Karl Bode wrote about the curious position Oculus Rift had taken in updating its software to include system-checking DRM. VR headset technology and game development, experiencing the first serious attempt at maturity in years, needs an open ecosystem in which to develop. What this DRM essentially did was remove the ability for games designed to run on the Rift from running on any other VR headset, with a specific targeting of community-built workarounds like Revive, which allowed HTC Vive owners to get Rift games running on that headset. Oculus, it should be noted, didn't announce the DRM aspect of the update; it just spit out the update and the public suddenly learned that programs like Revive no longer worked.

The backlash, to put it mildly, was swift and severe. Oculus having been acquired by Facebook likely didn't help what were already negative perceptions, supercharging the outcry with allegations of the kind of protectionism and the lack of care for the public that Facebook has enjoyed for roughly ever. Still, many saw the whole thing as peons screaming at a feudal lord: Oculus would simply ignore the whole thing. Just weeks ago, in fact, Oculus was working journalists at E3 in defense of the DRM.

The problem, [Oculus Head of Content Jason] Rubin said, comes with the wholesale distribution of a hack like Revive to the whole community, rather than to a few individuals. "[A personal hack] is a far cry difference from an institutional tool made and distributed to a mass number of people to [support other headsets], strip out DRM, strip out platform features and the like. For an individual to do that for themselves, that would be all right. Mass distribution is an entirely different situation."

No explanation on why the level of access to the workaround makes all the difference appears to have been offered, but it seems likely that the company didn't want to appear to be going after gamers and tinkerers, only larger development outfits. If so, the attempt didn't work, because software like Revive was in high demand. This is to be expected, as VR is just now starting to sprout from the seeds laid long ago, with impressive but limited options for both hardware and games to run on that hardware. Those limitations mean that any attempt at exclusivity being tied to hardware that is relatively expensive walls off each of the gardens and limits access and interest. For a technology still in its early stages, this would only stifle growth. Hence, the anger from the public.

Anger which appears to have worked, contrary to what some had thought. As silently as Oculus rolled out the DRM, it has now spit out an update which rolls it back. The world found out about it not from Oculus itself, which curiously didn't want to capitalize on some good press for once, but from Revive's development team.

The Oculus team has reversed course on one of its most unpopular decisions since launching the Rift VR headset in April: headset-specific DRM. After weeks of playing cat-and-mouse to block the "Revive" workaround, which translated the VR calls of Oculus games to work smoothly and seamlessly inside of the rival HTC Vive, Oculus quietly updated its hardware-specific runtime on Friday and removed all traces of that controversial DRM.

What's more, Oculus didn't mention the change in its runtime update notes, which are curiously future-dated one day forward on Saturday, June 25. The news instead broke when Revive's head developer posted a note on the project's Github download page. "I've only just tested this and I'm still in disbelief," the unnamed LibreVR developer wrote. Accordingly, the Revive team has since removed the patch's DRM-disabling feature, which had later been implemented as an extreme measure to make Oculus games play on the HTC Vive.

It appears that even when Oculus chooses to listen to its fans and potential customers, it can't be bothered to do so publicly. This strips its ability to claim credit for the move, credit which it desperately needs after several negative news cycles. Still, the company's PR ineptitude aside, it's a nice lesson in what public backlash and shaming can do to pressure a company to be a little more open.

Filed Under: drm, interoperability, oculus rift, revive, vr
Companies: facebook, oculus

Oculus Is Hurting VR's Development By Supporting Walled Gardens, Closed Ecosystems

from the tear-down-the-wall dept

Facebook's Oculus Rift was originally expected to lead the virtual reality charge and become a shining example of "VR done right," but a bungled launch and a series of sloppy public relations missteps have ensured that won't be happening any time soon.

The company generated a tidal wave of ill will after production issues delayed Oculus pre-order ship dates by two months or more. That was compounded by some overly broad terms of service language, and an Oculus decision to sell some headsets at Best Buy before pre-order customers had received their own headsets. Combined with a lack of "room scale" support (the ability to move freely in space using handheld controllers) out of the gate and a general nervousness about Facebook's snooping tendencies, Oculus has effectively given the HTC Vive a huge PR advantage as VR begins to slowly claw its way towards mainstream adoption.

Oculus isn't helping matters much this week with moves that indicate Facebook and Oculus are very much keen on embracing walled gardens, DRM, and closed ecosystems at a time when VR very much needs the exact opposite to thrive.

As it stands, Oculus Rift owners can play non-roomscale games designed for the Rift via the SteamVR store. In contrast, HTC Vive customers can't play games designed for the Oculus Rift, since Oculus and Facebook have decided to lean heavily on exclusives out of the gate. To play Oculus games, many Vive customers had taken to using third-party software known as Revive. But in a recent post to Reddit, Revive developers say Oculus and Facebook have deployed an update that stops the workaround in its tracks:

"From my preliminary research it seems that Oculus has also added a check whether the Oculus Rift headset is connected to their Oculus Platform DRM. And while Revive fools the application in thinking the Rift is connected, it does nothing to make the actual Oculus Platform think the headset is connected. Because only the Oculus Platform DRM has been changed this means that none of the Steam or standalone games were affected. Only games published on the Oculus Store that use the Oculus Platform SDK are affected"

Oculus is denying that the software update was specifically targeting Revive, only telling a number of different news outlets that the update was necessary to help curb piracy. Most of the comments to the media imply that shucks -- hacks like Revive just occasionally break during the course of software updates:

"We take the security, functionality and integrity of our system software very seriously and people should expect that hacked games won’t work indefinitely as regular updates to content, apps and our platform may break the hacks."

However, Revive developers say the update isn't checking to see whether or not software was legitimately purchased, but whether or not the Oculus headset itself is connected and being used to experience that content. To get around Oculus' update, the Revive developers have been forced to issue their own update that bypasses all DRM and ownership checks in order to work, something the developers say isn't the path they wanted to take and makes piracy easier than before:

"LibreVR has some concerns about hacking into purchase-protecting DRM in order to get around the Rift's hardware exclusivity. "I am worried about whether I'm helping piracy by implementing this workaround," he said. "When possible I'd like my workaround to help developers generate more revenue, not hurt that revenue." On the other hand, LibreVR also added that "pirates will always find a way to work around DRM, [so] I don't think my effort significantly contributed to that."

So at the end of the day, Oculus' latest decision to lock down its ecosystem not only pissed off the userbase, it contributed to a cat and mouse arms race that may actually ramp up the potential for piracy. Where's the benefit again?

Oculus' fall from grace among the VR faithful has been accelerated at times by company founder Palmer Luckey, who has been mercilessly hammered over at Reddit for repeatedly flip-flopping on claims regarding the headset. For example, this is what Luckey said about the ability to use different titles on different headsets last December:

"If customers buy a game from us, I don't care if they mod it to run on whatever they want. Our goal is not to profit by locking people to only our hardware—if it was, why in the world would we be supporting GearVR and talking with other headset makers? The software we create through Oculus Studios (using a mix of internal and external developers) are exclusive to the Oculus platform, not the Rift itself."

Except the company's behavior has focused on the exact opposite: Oculus and Facebook (or predominantly Facebook) pretty clearly believe that a closed door, walled garden approach to VR development is the path forward. The problem is that with a high cost of entry, the VR development community is already struggling for mainstream adoption; VR is very much in the 1.0 era and very much in a period of experimentation, and many (including Valve) believe that more open, cross platform development will help ensure a broader, happier overall userbase. From the overall negative timbre of the VR community right now, Oculus appears intent on learning this the hard way.

Filed Under: drm, oculus rift, revive, vr, walled gardens
Companies: facebook, oculus

Oculus Users Freak Out Over VR Headset's TOS, Though Most Of It Is Boilerplate

from the watching-the-watchers-watch dept

So Facebook's Oculus technically "launched" the Rift VR headset on March 28, and while the press generally seem to like the gear, the launch itself hasn't been going particularly well. Most users that pre-ordered still haven't received not only their headset -- but any kind of hard shipping date from the company. Initially, all users had to go on were some anonymous posts at Reddit implying that Facebook lawyers wouldn't let Oculus communicate a reason for the delays. Over the weekend however users received an e-mail informing them that because of an "unexpected component shortage" shipments have been delayed by a few weeks. To soothe the angry hordes, Oculus has decided to offer free shipping on all pre-orders.

But it's another part of the Oculus launch that has some people up in arms: the headset's terms of service.

Prompted almost solely by one complaint over at Reddit, numerous outlets have penned missives blasting the "super shady things" going on in the Oculus TOS. Among them are paragraphs like this one, that gives Oculus (and by proxy Facebook) the right to distribute user-contributed content the way they see fit:

"By submitting User Content through the Services, you grant Oculus a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual (i.e. lasting forever), non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free and fully sublicensable (i.e. we can grant this right to others) right to use, copy, display, store, adapt, publicly perform and distribute such User Content in connection with the Services. You irrevocably consent to any and all acts or omissions by us or persons authorized by us that may infringe any moral right (or analogous right) in your User Content."

The problem with getting hysterical over the TOS is that this language is essentially boilerplate, and attached to the terms of service for pretty much every service in existence so they can make a sharing technology work without being sued over copyright. While certainly worded poorly there's no real nefarious intent; it's CYA lawyer language. We've had to note this every single time one of these mass TOS freak outs occur, whether it has been Snapchat or Pinterest. And the laundry list of websites with exactly this kind of language is endless, including YouTube, Imgur, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.

But there's also been a number of users concerned about the fact that the Oculus headset communicates the user's usage behavior back to Facebook using "always on" processes like "OVRServer_x64.exe." Under the din of hive-mind Reddit outrage, the original poster used Wireshark for at least a preliminary, rough look at what's being transferred. So far it appears to be the sort of things you'd expect any gaming device to transmit (update checking, social and buddy list sharing systems, a system that detects when the headset is mounted to your face so the Oculus store can be launched on your PC).

While Facebook and Oculus certainly could be up to no good, nobody's actually been able to identify the software doing anything untoward, which is kind of important if you're going to hold a mass freak out about your privacy being trampled.

Facebook's certainly no saint on the privacy front, but it seems unlikely that Facebook or Oculus would want to sabotage the first major foray into VR by saddling the tech with too much snoopvertising (which its target audience would be savvy enough to ferret out). That's not to say that can't happen later, nor is it to say that the boilerplate language being using in the TOS couldn't use more plain English. But the alien nature of VR combined with a lust for VR headlines and Facebook's history as a data hoover has created a bit of a monster that appears to be more smoke than fire (for now).

If Oculus has a problem, it's that they've been doing a piss poor job communicating any of this to customers. In the same way the company remained mute about its shipping problems, neither Oculus nor Facebook has managed to get ahead of this story with a simple update on how the data collection is fairly routine -- or what OVRServer_x64.exe is watching (they're likely too busy freaking out about the shipping issues). The most Oculus has managed to say on the subject is this short and plucky post at Reddit by Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, which fails to offer anything of substance outside of calling the original Reddit thread "a yarn."

All of this may become a problem for Oculus given the HTC Vive's upcoming launch. Between the Vive having "room scale" at launch (the ability to stand and move around in VR space using hand controllers), this privacy scuff up (genuine or not) and the Oculus shipping delay (meaning Vives could arrive in user homes first), the company has dug itself a bit of a PR hole. Oculus had already soured some gamers by partnering with arguably the 21st Century's biggest data collection apparatus in the first place. If Oculus really wants to be the VR headset to buy this year, its PR and public communications team is going to have to start doing a little more than the occasional grunt on Reddit.

Filed Under: oculus rift, privacy, terms of service

DailyDirt: Animals Augmented With Technology

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Computers have undoubtedly changed how people live, and as computers get smaller and wearable, they'll only become more and more intertwined with our lives. And it appears that we can't leave our animal friends behind in this technological evolution. Here are just a few projects for getting other creatures addicted to gadgets.

• Second Livestock is a virtual reality environment designed for farm animals, specifically chickens. Imagine a chicken computer interface -- like an Oculus Rift for chickens -- that tricked the birds into thinking they were actually free-range animals when, in fact, they were still caged on an omnidirectional treadmill with a Matrix-like virtual world fed into their brains. There is no spoon, chicks. (And this Second Life adaptation is only a suggestion.) [url]
• Maybe we can start talking to dolphins with technology developed by one of the inventors of Google Glass. Researchers are just starting to hear dolphins "talk" in computer-recognizable whistles, so maybe we'll hear they say, "So long and thanks for all the fish" someday. [url]
• Bonobos controlling a robot sounds like a cool idea, but apparently not $20,000 on Kickstarter cool. Perhaps we're lucky that crowdfunders didn't kickstart a planet of the apes.... [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: animals, bonobos, dolphin, hmi, interspecies communication, oculus rift, second life, second livestock, virtual reality

It's All Fun And Virtual Reality Until Oculus Gets Bought For $2 Billion -- Then ZeniMax Wants Its Cut

from the fun-of-employment-agreements dept

It's always funny to see the greedy folks reveal themselves after a company sells out for many millions or billions of dollars. The latest is ZeniMax, the owners of Id Software, and the former employer of John Carmack. Carmack, of course, is the famous video gaming guru who left ZeniMax last year to go full time at Oculus. Prior to that, Carmack had tried to work at both companies, but after ZeniMax no longer wanted him working on virtual reality, Carmack reasonably decided to go full time at Oculus. While not exactly common, it's also not unheard of for "rockstar" tech folks to work at and/or run multiple companies at the same time -- think Steve Jobs at Pixar/Apple and Jack Dorsey at Twitter/Square. Usually there aren't any real "ownership" issues to deal with, but it appears that once Facebook ponied up $2 billion for Oculus, ZeniMax suddenly decided that Carmack was using its proprietary technology to make the Oculus Rift work. Of course, if that were true, you would have thought that ZeniMax would have raised the issue long ago, rather than waiting until many months after they knew what Carmack was working on at Oculus. This just stinks of a company that did nothing, now looking to cash in on a big deal it had nothing at all to do with.

Carmack, in response to this has noted that no work he did has been patented, and while ZeniMax may own his code, they can't claim to own the concept of virtual reality. This may not come down to patents (or copyright). It may come down to the terms of Carmack's employment agreement. As lots of developers know, it's not uncommon for some companies to have ridiculously overbroad employment agreements that try to claim the rights to basically any concept you ever thought about while you work for them.

Filed Under: deals, john carmack, oculus rift, ownership, virtual reality
Companies: facebook, id software, oculus, zenimax