The best part of Oculus Quest: It simplifies difficult things

The Oculus Quest may seem like a modest step forward for the casual viewer: it's about virtual reality, minus the cables. But the product is more complicated than its simple silhouette suggests. An autonomous and adaptable headset that does not require a PC or sensors to track the head and hands at the scale of the piece in virtual reality has required a dramatic leap from the team Oculus in a very short time.

Since the release of the original version of Oculus in 2016, VR has created a number of additional technological streps that have brought them here. Jason Rubin, vice president of VR / AR partnerships and content for Facebook, is confident that these changes will impress the first reviewers and the audience of the helmet. What seems simple will feel significant.

The material will be available on May 21 and pre-orders have been opened today. You can already read our full article on the product itself, and I have been able to use the material at home without any restrictions in the past week.

The next generation of portable VR

I agree with Rubin's assessment after spending so much time with the material. The Quest is an amazing engineering, and it is hard to believe that it is capable of providing relatively high visual quality and imperceptible tracking latency using only the standalone and somewhat aging Snapdragon 835 chip. As a reminder, it's the same system as on a chip found in a Google Pixel 2 smartphone.

"We have implemented numerous optimizations from the software stack to the hardware to give Quest the best possible performance," said Sean Liu, director of hardware product management, Polygon. "For example, an active cooling system allows Quest to run at much higher clock speeds for extended periods, allowing us to draw more power from the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC."

The hardware team even had to be creative about connecting the controllers to the headset because it was important to minimize the latency.

"To achieve this, we invented a brand new custom wireless protocol that allowed us to reduce controllers' latency to a level below that which could be achieved using Bluetooth or WiFi – in fact level as low as 2 milliseconds, "Liu explained.

But most players do not care about the engineering used in Quest. What's important is that it's both fun and easy to use. And that's where the quest really shines: it's completely autonomous, so it does not have to be connected to a PC. It does not require an external sensor, even though its controllers offer six degrees of freedom, allowing you to manipulate objects in a 3D space as you would with a traditional Rift or HTC Vive.

You can stay in the same place or sit down to play many games if you run out of space, but the room-scale RV is also available, provided you have one. minimum of 6.5 feet on 6.5 feet of free space. Or you can switch between these options at any time. According to Rubin, this ease of use and this almost instant configuration were at the rendezvous.

"We are competing with all the entertainment time of everyone," he said. "You can put Netflix, play the PlayStation, read a book, do thousands of things. Virtual reality should not take half an hour or 15 minutes … That's why we thought the most important thing to deal with in the first place was [getting rid of] these external sensors and the constancy of configuring it every time. "

Much of the simplicity of the system comes from the Guardian system, which is a security mechanism that shows you a wired virtual barrier when you're about to get out of your usable virtual reality space. The Quest will even take you out of virtual reality and show you the world around you with the system's surveillance cameras if you get out of it completely. Creating a new Guardian configuration is as simple as looking down and following the area with the controller; the whole process takes about 10 seconds.

"Even if your Guardian has changed and you have moved to a different room, there is absolutely no time to paint Guardian on the floor and leave," said Rubin. "It's just not a problem anymore."

This change makes the transition to virtual reality so much easier that Oculus will not offer any longer all products that use external sensors, in fact. You may be able to find an original Rift in the aftermarket, but from now on, the Rift S and Oculus Quest will be the standard products offered by Rift for a complete gaming experience, alongside the more limited Oculus Go and Gear VR .

It is a big change, but the wireless virtual reality and scale of a room poses its own challenges. Rubin pointed out that it was difficult to say how players would react to the total abandonment of the PC. Some people are a bit too enthusiastic about their movements, while others take even more time to become familiar with the movements with the helmet.

"Sometimes you put people in virtual reality wireless and they fly everywhere in the room," he said. "And thank god, we have the Guardian system, because they are suddenly cleared, and it's so liberating. Other people use the weight of the cable to tell them where the north is, if you will, where their PC is. And without that, they feel a bit naked, especially if they are used to playing with the cable. So they are a bit more conservative in what they do. There were a lot of surprises.

I asked Rubin why the magazine embargo was lifted much earlier than Quest's May 21 release date, and his response was brutal.

"We're getting more sales," Rubin told Polygon. "We believe in these products. We believe that the criticisms will be good. If you think that the reviews will be good, you want them as soon as possible … In the end, whoever holds [reviews] until the day of the launch is worried. "