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Two years ago, Oculus, owned by Facebook, has quietly started demonstrating a prototype of an autonomous VR helmet called Santa Cruz. Unlike the Oculus Rift, this prototype did not need to be connected to a PC to work. Like the Oculus Rift, he promised an immersive quality that could help people understand why they want to end up in a virtual environment, by wearing a camera on their face.
Now this prototype is coming out. At its annual developer conference in San Jose, Oculus unveiled the Quest, the official name of the Santa Cruz helmet. Oculus plans to ship it next spring for $ 399.
This places Quest at the heart of Oculus's two other headsets: the $ 199 Oculus Go mobile and the $ 75 Oculus Rift, which also requires a powerful PC. But the Quest helmet is not just the end result of a product differentiation strategy. This is a showcase of the potentially revolutionary virtual reality technology and the ambitious goal of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, that 1 billion people use VR, as he expressed in the speech liminary of the event.
The Quest material seems banal from the outside and uses the same touch controllers as the Rift. But there are four wide angle sensors on the helmet, which are part of the technology that sets the Quest apart. The quest has six degrees of freedom – "6DoF", as it is sometimes called – which allows you to follow your head rather than rotate it. In other words, you can move, not just look around.
The high-powered wired headsets, such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, also offer 6DoF, but they are technically complicated to make with a standalone headset; The Oculus Go offers only three degrees of freedom. The Lenovo Mirage Solo standalone headset, launched early in the year, can deliver a 6DoF head movement, but only in a restricted area, and its manual controllers are 3DoF.
Usually, these six degrees of freedom are achieved by using sensors around the physical part, in addition to the sensors on the VR headset. In the case of the quest, no room sensor is needed. Instead, Hugo Barra, director of Facebook VR, said, "Quest uses advanced computerized vision algorithms to track your location in real time without any external sensors."
The company calls this technology Insight. The four wide-angle headphone sensors look for distinct edges, corners, and features in the surrounding room, and create a three-dimensional map of the environment. Barra said that the headset calculates an estimate of your head position "every millisecond" and can even provide accurate tracking in areas larger than those at the scale of a room. For example, the company has set up a 4,000 square foot "arena" at Oculus Connect, where people can use Quest helmets to play a free version of the Wild West shooter. Dead and buried.
Basically, Oculus uses a technology that typically requires a set of multi-point sensors in a room and recreates the same experience with the four sensors in your head, using machine learning and computer vision. That's what you can do using all the information you have: floors, ceilings, light fixtures, art objects, furniture. There could inevitably be challenges with that; things like super-bright floors and unmarked white walls could theoretically trip him up. Barra said that Oculus had tested Insight in "hundreds of different household spaces" and was convinced that it would work even in these environments.
The optics of the quest seems to be the same as that of the Oculus Go; Quest has a display resolution of 1600 by 1400 per eye. However, according to Oculus, the Quest has a "lens spacing adjustment to optimize visual comfort." (Although the Go screen is good, the IPD setting is essential for a comfortable experience.) The built-in sound of the headphones is also supposed to be improved compared to the sound of the Go, and the Quest has 64GB of internal memory, Go 32 concerts.
Of course, virtual reality headsets are no less convincing than the applications that run them. And given that Facebook's activity encourages people to use its applications, Oculus, owned by Facebook, may be better positioned to offer add-on games and VR social teleconferencing applications than some of its competitors. Oculus reports that 50 application titles are available for the launch of Quest next year, including exceptional Rift games. Robo's reminder and The climb-With more in the works.
As Mr Zuckerberg pointed out in his remarks, VR still has a long way to go before reaching this milestone of one billion users, or even 2%. He identified ergonomics and an autonomous software ecosystem as the two fronts needed to achieve it, but there are other more important ones to deal with first: the threads and a steep learning curve. The standalone headsets are a solution to these particular problems – and even though this year's Oculus Go has carefully gone through these blocks, the Quest has taken a leap forward.
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