Want to share your Oculus Quest or Quest 2 with your friends and family? Well, soon you can, as Facebook introduces a host of updates to the service, including some experimental sharing settings.
Oculus Quest Multi-User Accounts and App Sharing
The Oculus Quest 2 might be an awesome device, but it costs around $ 300. This is a fairly hefty investment and isn’t conducive to having your entire family decked out in sparkly new VR headsets.
Thankfully, Oculus has confirmed via a blog post that it is to add multi-user accounts and app sharing to the Oculus ecosystem. Soon you’ll be able to share the Oculus hardware with the entire family, and everyone can have a different account!
What Are the New Oculus Sharing Settings?
These new settings aren’t active just yet. Oculus says this:
Next month [February 2021], we are rolling out two of the most requested features from our VR community: Multi-User accounts, the ability for multiple accounts to log into a single headset; and App Sharing, the ability to share apps with others on the shared device.
So, when February rolls around, you’ll start seeing changes in your settings which allow multi-user accounts and app sharing. Oculus goes on to explain:
With these features, the primary account holder will be able to add secondary accounts to their device and share the apps they purchase with these secondary accounts. Not only will this enable safe sharing, but game progress and achievements will be personalized and saved separately for each account.
Perhaps it might be time to draw up a household Oculus Quest rota…we can see this ending in tantrums, tears, and possibly broken Oculus hardware.
What Do the New Oculus Sharing Settings Allow?
Initially, Oculus plans to push the additional features experimentally on the Quest 2. The rest of the Oculus hardware family will see the sharing functions at a later date. Oculus explains what these extra settings will allow users to do.
… a primary account holder can add up to three secondary accounts and enable App Sharing on a single device. We expect an increasing number of households to have multiple Quest devices, so the App Sharing feature will later expand to allow a primary account holder to share their purchases across three devices.
So, you can add up to three other family members to your Oculus Quest and each one will have their own separate account space. You can also share your purchases across three different Oculus devices. This, Oculus hopes, will help stamp out piracy.
Get Ready for New Oculus Quest Settings
As mentioned, these new settings will arrive soon. The blog post says February 13th (which is a Saturday, not a Friday… phewph!) but be aware that Oculus has aimed this post at developers. Once feedback rolls in, Oculus will roll out sharing settings to the general public.
