Oculus' Quest is the first true VR gaming console

Oculus VR had a big hardware surprise to unveil at its annual Connect Developer Conference on Wednesday: Quest's new standalone virtual reality headset. The Quest is the culmination of the last five years of VR work at Oculus, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was a big step towards the entry of a billion people in virtual reality.

But the next day, the Oculus Technology Director, John Carmack – a legend of the video game industry who is responsible for creating shooters titles like Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake – was simpler: the Oculus Quest is a gaming console. "Realistically, we will end up competing with the Nintendo Switch," Carmack says the crowd. When the Oculus Go headset is 80% media and 20% games, the Oculus Quest is focused on gaming. In fact, this is probably the first virtual reality headset to offer the benefits that have attracted people to products from Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo.

Carmack argues that the Oculus Quest, just like the Nintendo Switch, reorients how, where and how far you can enjoy games. Oculus is not trying to replace its premium Rift headset in the same way that Nintendo does not attempt to replace your PC or Xbox. But it creates something portable and user-friendly, while offering some of the same experiences as a more powerful device.

More generally, the Oculus Quest offers consumers the same benefits as a traditional gaming console: the plug-and-play nature, the consistent software platform and the integrated content library, all without costs additional compared to television. . (The Oculus Quest, thankfully, has its built-in display.) The Sony PlayStation VR offers some of these benefits, but it is positioned as an accessory to a console and not a console in its own right. The HTC Vive, meanwhile, has its games spread over several PC-based services.

Nate Mitchell, Rift Manager at Oculus, endorsed this characterization in an interview with The edge. "We hope [the Quest] certainly offers this console-level experience for people, "he said. It also describes the audience of Oculus Quest as being similar to that of consoles in general.

"I think for Quest, the question is," Do you have a PC? The reality is that many of my friends do not, "says Mitchell. In the past, this meant that many people who might be interested in virtual reality, not for the novelty of the experience, but for the real content – games like Epic Robo's reminder and Crytek The climb – I could not try anything because of the barrier at the entrance. As a result, they tend to write off the entire RV as something that is not, at least until it is cheaper and more accessible.

"They want this experience, but they have not been able to do it by buying a PC," adds Mitchell. "And so I think Quest will be the perfect product for those players who are waiting for their moment to enter virtual reality, but who have not really found the right path."

Of course, it is far too early to say if the Quest will become a more popular and popular product for Oculus than the first-generation Rift. And Mitchell makes it clear that he sees the Rift as the current "standard of reference" for RV experiments. Oculus says a title like Ready at Dawn's Solitary echo would be difficult to carry until the chipset improves to the point of satisfying the majority of users.

But the Quest is the first headset that offers almost all the benefits of Rift, without the costly requirements that have prevented virtual reality from being captured outside the crowds of PC enthusiasts and gamers. It also takes the promise of mobile VR – the idea that you can take it anywhere and use it without restriction – and turn it into a much more powerful device with full tracking and motion controllers.

Even though it will cost $ 400, a little more than your standard PlayStation or Switch, the quest is the first time that the promise of virtual reality, as envisioned by Oculus, will truly be accessible to a mass market. That this device, or one, two, three or perhaps four long-term iterations, the one that crosses the mainstream, is not at all relevant. It is clear that Oculus sees its future in wireless and autonomous headsets that work as game consoles. Now, all you have to do is draw the biggest names in game development to create new titles and find a winning formula of accessibility and performance that makes a virtual reality headset a real competitor for time and money. people.