Oculus Quest Review: VR has just abandoned the PC



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The Oculus Quest could be the device that will revolutionize the virtual reality market and attract the masses. It is easy to use, simple to install, works well and its price is reasonable. It's a game console built into a headset and it's better than you expect.

Oculus has revealed The Quest, a standalone VR helmet at 6 degrees of freedom at $ 399, last fall at Oculus Connect 5. After several years of anticipation, it appeared that the preparation of Oculus would have a significant impact on the RV industry. And now that I've spent a week with Quest, I can say with certainty that this publication marks a turning point in the history of the RV industry. Quest will change the game.

Oculus accepts pre-orders for the Quest, with delivery scheduled for May 21st. If the Quest does not revive the adoption of VR, we risk being forced to give a little more credit to those who suffer. This headset checks all the right boxes and leaves very few desirable features of the table. If this fails to attract the market of billions of virtual reality users that Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had planned to spend $ 2 billion to buy the Oculus brand, I do not know if I can do it.

Oculus Quest VR Headset Specifications

SoC Qualcomm Snapdragon 835
Display Two OLED panels 1440×1600 72Hz
IPD parameter Mechanical adjustment of the IPD (undisclosed range)
Storage room 64 or 128 GB internal flash storage
l & # 39; Audio Built-in speakers and microphone, dual 3.5mm audio jack (one on each side), headset accessory available
RAM 4GB
Drums Built-in Lithium Ion battery (mAh undisclosed)
Face interface and strap Mesh knit, micro nylon thread, spandex material
Tracking technology 6-DoF tracking based on an Oculus Insight camera with motion controllers
Contribution 2nd Generation Oculus Touch Controllers
Play space required Stationary or on the scale of the room. The size of the room requires a minimum of
2 x 2 m or 6.5 x 6.5 feet of free space on the ground
Dimensions 193 x 105 x 222mm
Weight 571G
Price 64 GB: $ 399, 128 GB: $ 499

A long time to come

Oculus has long opted for a stand-alone and unattached virtual reality solution. The company revealed for the first time the Santa Cruz project in October 2016 at Oculus Connect 3. Santa Cruz was a concept prototype of Rift with a PC built at the back. In October 2017, at Oculus Connect 4, Oculus gave us a preview of a version of the Santa Cruz project almost ready for production, which would evolve into Quest.

Quest is not Oculus' first attempt to acquire a standalone VR headset. Last year, the company released the Oculus Go. The headset supports basic tracking at 3 degrees of freedom (DoF). It replaced the Gear VR platform but did not set the bar high for virtual reality devices. As an entry-level device designed to introduce people to virtual reality, Oculus Go does a great job. But its limited tracking function ultimately cripples its ability to deliver the full experience of the connected Oculus Rift to a computer.

The Quest bridges the gap between Go and Rift and offers a 6 – scale DoF move to the room scale (or warehouse) in a stand – alone, unattached package.

Powered by Snapdragon – Circa 2017

The processing power of Oculus Quest comes from a Snapdragon 835 SoC, which would have been at the forefront of technology when Oculus started working with the platform in 2016. This is a surprising evolution for the second quarter of 2019 , while the Qualcomm catalog contains much more powerful chips. Nevertheless, the developers have managed to draw impressive performance from the mature mobile chipset (for more information about this later).

List of All-Star features, fit and finish of the highest order

The Oculus Quest is perhaps the best VR headset I have ever used. It looks and feels like a high quality product and something you would like to own. All materials are well refined, the fit and finish are fantastic. It is clear that Oculus has learned a lot about atrial design over the years. The new device improves the appearance of Rift and Go.

Like the Rift, the Quest has a cloth-covered exterior, giving it an elegant appearance (at least when new). The Rift has introduced the outside of the fabric to allow infrared light to pass through, but the Quest does not use infrared light or an external sensor for its tracking system. The fabric used here is therefore for aesthetic purposes. However, this can facilitate heat dissipation for all internal components. While the Go has a metal face plate that serves as a heat sink to keep cold rooms, the Quest has a plastic plate without visible ventilation holes.

The Quest also features the best features of the Go headset, including the Headband Speaker System and the Removable / Washable Memory Foam Face Cushion.

Superior visuals

The Oculus Quest headset uses a less powerful computer platform than the Rift, but that has not stopped Oculus from improving the display hardware of its new headset. The Oculus Quest has two 1440×1600 displays, which is a significant improvement over the 1080×1200 resolution per Rift eye.

To compensate for lower computing power and higher resolution, Oculus opted for a lower refresh rate to reduce the required performance.

The Rift has 90Hz displays and, at launch, Oculus claimed that 90Hz was the minimum required to prevent motion sickness. Since then, the company has eased its position on this metric. The two panels of the quest are also updated 72 times per second, just like the Go. In addition, the Oculus Rift S should propose a frequency of 80Hz.

Even in this case, the Quest headset requires a much higher pixel fill rate. To drive the Rift, your GPU needs to deliver 233,280,000 pixels per second, while Quest's Snapdragon SoC has to cope with 331,776,000 pixels per second. It's a miracle that this mobile chipset can handle this type of workload, but it's doing very well.

The Quest also includes a mechanical IPD tuning system that allows you to compose the lenses according to the distance between your students. This is a notable feature as the Rift S will use the IPD software setting. The Quest is one step ahead.

Best of all, the Quest features the impressive Oculus-developed Fresnel lenses for the Go, which minimize the dreaded deformation of Godray's first-generation Rift image.

Insight tracking system

In addition to driving the graphics, the Qualcomm processor must also calculate the positions of the headphones and controllers simultaneously.

To release the headset from the host computer, Oculus created the Insight tracking system for Quest. It uses headphone-based cameras to map the surrounding environment. The Quest uses four cameras equipped with fish-eye lenses to follow the movements. Two cameras are mounted on the top corners facing outwards and slightly at the back. The other two cameras are on the lower edge, facing forward and down to monitor the ground and the lower half of the space.

This is quite different from the Rift sensor-based external tracking solution called Constellation, which tracks the infrared trends of the headset with cameras on your desktop. Cameras require high USB bandwidth and sensors that you need to connect to a computer.

New touch controllers

Insight cameras are also used to monitor the movement of your touch controllers. The new controllers all include the same buttons in more or less the same layout as the original touch controllers. However, Oculus moved the halo with LEDs tracking up the controllers so that helmet-based cameras could see them with less occlusion.

When the controllers are visible to the cameras, the tracking fidelity is as good as that obtained with the Rift. And when you move away from cameras, Oculus uses software and gyroscopic information to evaluate the position of your controllers. Unlike Windows Mixed Reality Controllers, which do not follow very well outside the camera range, the new Touch Controllers work well beyond the camera's field of view.

The new touch controllers look a lot like the old ones, but their ergonomics are improved. The handles were slightly thicker, which is a change that I welcome. The original controllers were a bit too small and my hands still tense when I used them. The new shape is much more comfortable for me.

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