How to use Oculus Test Users to log in on multiple Oculus Quests for sideloading without the need of a Facebook account

The mandatory Facebook login has created a huge backlash from the VR community, not only because of the possible privacy concerns that may arise but also because it lets Facebook apply more control over how people use the headsets they own. The cases of people banned from Facebook for having used the same account on two headsets at the same time are a clear example of one of these problems. With this policy, Facebook is trying to make sure that one headset corresponds to only one person.

And apart from the consumers’ issue, I’m listening to many complaints also from little companies and educational institutions that usually employed some consumer Quests to use or test their own custom experiences and that now find themselves in the difficult situation of being forced to use personal Facebook accounts to log in on the Quest 2. This is of course unfeasible because a company can’t ask its employees to use the personal Facebook account to log in on a VR headset.

But there is a solution that can solve some of these problems, that lets you log in on multiple Oculus Quests that you own, without using any real Facebook account (for now), if the only thing that you want to do is sideloading applications. This solution is called Oculus Test Users: let me show you what they are and how you can use them.

All you need to know on Oculus Test Users – Video

I have created a video with everything you need to know about Test Users: what are they, how to create them, how to use them. If you prefer watching videos instead of reading words, this is all you need to watch in this post!

Why Oculus Test Users?

Let me detail a bit more the use case depicted above. Even if as a consumer I don’t like the mandatory Facebook login policy, as a developer/startupper, I find it even more problematic. The reason is that there are many cases where you just want to use an Oculus Quest to install applications you yourself have developed, but you don’t want that device to be associated with your personal identity, also because it may be a device that is shared inside a working group. Some examples of this situation are:

• If you are the developer of a VR indie game studio and you want to test a multiplayer VR game;
• You are the boss of a small company and you want some of your employees to use a custom application that you yourselves have developed;
• You are the professor in an educational institution (e.g. a University) and you want to give your students VR headset so that they learn how to develop in VR.

In this cases, the typical login scenarios offered by Facebook are quite unsuitable:

• Personal Facebook login is not an option, because a university or a small company can’t request its students/employees to use their personal Facebook accounts on institutional devices. Furthermore, Personal Facebook login is for consumer usage, and this is clearly not a consumer use;
• The correct way would be to use Oculus For Business, but this is a bit overkill for small companies or freelancers that maybe have just 3 headsets, and is not suitable for universities, that technically are not “businesses”. Furthermore, schools are always tight on money, and can’t spend $800 on a single “For Business” headset.

What would be needed is a way to let a person login on a headset he doesn’t own with a Facebook account associated with the organization he’s in so that he can install, play, and test custom VR experiences without using any personal data. This way actually already exists and is called “Oculus Test Users”.

What are Oculus Test Users?

An Oculus Test User is basically a fake Facebook/Oculus account associated with your Oculus developer account. A Test User can do almost everything that a real user can do:

• Log in inside an Oculus Quest;
• Install and run sideloaded applications (with SideQuest or ADB);
• Have a full profile (avatar, locale, preferred settings, etc…);
• Exploit all Facebook social features;
• Friend other Test Users;
• Buy in-app purchases;

But it has strong limitations for what concerns the main features of a headset:

• It can NOT buy products on the Oculus Store;
• It probably will NOT be able to use the parallel official unapproved content distribution platform that Facebook is developing. And since SideQuest wants to implement it, there is the risk that it won’t be able to also use SideQuest in the future;
• It can NOT friend people with real Facebook accounts, just the other Test Users.

Basically a Test User is a fake account to let you login into a headset and test applications that you or your partners have developed but without the possibility of using the Quest Store and of friending real people. For a consumer, this is no use (a consumer buys a headset to play games like Beat Saber that are on the store), but for a developer that wants for instance to test a multiplayer game with his colleagues, this is of paramount importance.

An Oculus Test User gets immediately associated with a Facebook Test User, meaning that it is like if your test user has merged its Oculus and Facebook account, so a Test User can be used to not only login into your device, but also to test all the Facebook features that your app has implemented.

You can create as many test users as you want, and since it is a developer feature, it doesn’t require a Facebook account yet. At the time of writing, having an Oculus developer account doesn’t require a mandatory Facebook account. This means that technically you are able thanks to Test Users to log in on a Quest without you having any kind of Facebook account. If the only thing that you want is using SideQuest, with Test Users you can do it without Facebook, isn’t it cool?

How to create Test Users?

The creation of Test Users is overly simple. These are the steps that you have to follow:

• Create an Oculus developer account and an organization for it. There are many tutorials about it, especially because it is the main step needed to use SideQuest, so I won’t go into many details here. Basically you have to create an account on the Oculus Developer Dashboard, and then use the “Create New Organization” button on the upper left corner, or the “Create” button on the list of available organizations to create a new one. An organization is something like your company or your workgroup. If you are already registered as a developer, you can skip this step;

• Select your organization in the dedicated dropdown menu to enter the management of that organization;
• Select the “Test Users” tab;
• Hit the “Add Test User” button in the upper right corner;

• Fill in the data of the test users. Facebook requires that you enter the “prefix” for the username and the e-mail. The prefix is the first part of the name and e-mail so that you can identify what those test users are for. So for instance, the test users to test your boxing training game (HitMotion?) may have “BoxingUser” as the first part of the name, while the ones for your training experience may be “FireTraining”. Facebook will add to this string a random sequence of numbers and letters to create the final username and e-mail: the 2 test users for the boxing training game may so become “BoxingUser_34fhi” and “BoxingUser_aa321”. The form requires you to also fill in other data (like the locale of the user, the PIN for the store, the password of the account, etc…) that are pretty self-explanatory. In the end, you can also specify if these users may also be fake developers of your organization and if they are all friends with each other. It is interesting that you can create multiple users at the same time, but when I tested the feature, it didn’t work for me, so I had always to create one at a time (I guess this is a software bug);

• When you hit the Submit button, the system works a bit, and then you return to the list of the test users, where your new users have just appeared! You can see that Facebook has associated with them a fake name (usually a common English name followed by some random words), a fake username, and a fake email.

And that’s it, easy peasy! The dashboard also offers you simple management features for the test users: you can delete the ones that you don’t need anymore and you can export the list to CSV in case you need to import that list somewhere else (e.g. an Excel file).

You can now use these Test Users as real Facebook Users

Once you have the data of the test users, in particular the fake e-mail and the password you have chosen, you can use it in place of a real Facebook user. As I told you before, every Oculus Test User has an associated Facebook Test User, so you may use it in whatever context where you need a Facebook login, provided that you don’t need to friend real people or buy content on the store.

I haven’t tried to directly log-in on my Quest with a test user because it would require me to factory reset the device, but I tried to use one to log in on my Oculus app, and bam! It worked like a charm! As soon as I entered the data of my fake user “Emma”, the app asked me to set up my VR settings and to associate an Oculus device with it, as it happened the first time I used my real user. And as soon as I logged in, I could see the Oculus store, library, and settings, exactly as it happens with my real user.

https://gfycat.com/focusedrepentantfallowdeer

And even more, I tried to log in directly into Facebook with it, and it worked! I could navigate inside Facebook easily, watch my timeline, my friends, etc… all as Emma! This is a great feature for testing, kudos to Facebook for that.

Using this method, you can create how many accounts you want, all associated with your Oculus Developer Account, log in into your Oculus Quest 2 devices with them, and use them for testing your own experiences together with your colleagues!

Test Users alongside a real user

In its guide, Facebook says that you can add a test user in parallel to your real user on a Quest, but the feature it suggests in the guide is not present in my Quest yet, so I guess it refers to a multiple-users scenario that Facebook is working on but that has not been released yet. It suggests me to go to Devices -> Users, but I have no such feature in the UI of my Quest. This confirms what Facebook has already announced, that is that multi-user usage is coming to Quest, provided that all users have a Facebook account.

Learn more

For more info on Oculus Test Users, you can refer to the official page on the documentation.

And now…

…have fun with test users! In every context you may need to have some devices that are just used to test or run custom-developed apps, they are the way to go! You don’t have to worry about having a real Facebook login on every device, or risking to be banned because you’ve used your only Facebook account to log in on five headsets.

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