New Oculus account setup error OVR88948175

twhall

We run a VR lab at the University with 19 Oculus Rift and 4 HTC Vive stations, open to all faculty, staff, and students.  We require each user to sign into Windows with their own University account, and to create their own Oculus account.  Beginning in mid February, new Oculus users have hit a brick wall in their Oculus setup, with Oculus error OVR88948175.

Oculus is evidently trying to download something to "C:\Program Files\Oculus\Software", which requires admin privileges -- even though the Oculus software is already fully installed on the machine.  If a user clicks the "Change Location" button and navigates into their own folder space, it has no effect:

The pathname in the dialog doesn't change -- which is an obvious bug -- and there's no way past this error.  We've been discussing this with Oculus support, but their bottom line is:  "we aren't able to provide much support for this situation, since we recommend using an admin account with the software."  As my colleague put it to them, succinctly: "if the Oculus software only works for admins, it does not work for us."  We are not going to provide admin accounts to everyone on campus.

We have been using Oculus hardware and software since the DK1.  We've incorporated Oculus into our in-house VR software.  Our lab is a seed for VR on this campus, and departments across campus are looking to us for experience and advice in setting up their own labs.  Investment is set to grow exponentially.  This was never a problem until a few weeks ago, evidently related to some recent Oculus software update.  It affects only new users.  Old users already set up with non-admin accounts continue to work.

Unless we can find a way past this roadblock, we can no longer recommend Oculus for a large-scale University investment in VR.  There are many alternatives ...

Has anybody else hit this error?  Any known work-arounds?  Are we the only ones attempting to operate such a facility?

EscapeStudiosVR

Just wanted to echo the sentiment above, found this thread whilst searching for a related issue.  We are also an educational institution, albeit with only three Rift workstations, however we also do not and will not grant local admin access to end users.  UAC has been around a long time now and "run it as admin" was an accepted workaround in the early days but doesn't carry any weight now. We have over 300 workstations spread around multiple floors and the havoc wreaked by allowing anyone to install anything and change all settings doesn't bear thinking about.  

Regarding the issue reported, my only success was logging into one of the workstations as an admin account, changing the library location to a user writable area and then letting the original account try again.  As with the OP simply changing it to the same writable location as the user themselves did not work and generated the generic error that at least led me here.

There's been no response in this thread but I hope this feedback can at least be silently integrated into future development of the Rift software.