The DeanBeat: Will Oculus Quest bring Zuckerberg to its 1 billion VR users?

It was a great moment for virtual reality this week when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the Oculus Quest, a stand-alone wireless VR headset that will debut at $ 400 in the spring of 2019. the form of virtual reality taking off in the mass market.

Zuckerberg joked that the company was at 1% of last year's target of bringing a billion people into virtual reality. The question is whether the quest will be Facebook's biggest chance of achieving that goal. Obviously, the $ 200 Oculus Go is sold well, but it does not match a gaming device. The Go is a stand-alone wireless VR headset, but it only has one low remote control, with three degrees of freedom (3DoF). It will probably not be the device that will allow Zuckerberg to achieve his goal.

I think the Quest, which used to be called Santa Cruz, has a lot more potential. I played four games on the quest this week and I think it has a shot. It fills a position between the low-end Oculus Go and the high-end PC-based Oculus Rift headsets.

Until now, Oculus has shown Quest game experiences like Dead & Buried Arena, Project Tennis Scramble, Face Your Fears 2 and Superhot VR. It was not high-end Triple-A experiences, but I appreciated them all.

The Quest integrates its own computer tools and eliminates the notion, which limits the market, to buy a laptop or a computer worth $ 1,000 to play games of high quality in virtual reality. The Quest has two high quality manual controls (six degrees of freedom or 6DoF). In addition to that, the Quest is wireless, and there is no delay or latency. He followed inside for a much bigger gaming space. And he will have organized titles, including some of the best Oculus Rift on the PC.

John Carmack, Chief Technology Officer at Oculus, said Quest was not a high-end gaming device, precisely because it did not have the processor or the graphics power of the PC. But it can be a real competitor of the Nintendo Switch, which is not VR. Like the Switch, the Quest is a highly portable device. The Switch sold 20 million units in its first 15 months of sales, making it one of Nintendo's biggest console hits. But the switch only costs $ 300, it has huge game icons like Mario and Zelda, and now, a swarm of independent game developers is targeting it as a viable gaming platform.

Quest is too expensive compared to game consoles, but not as expensive as other VR products. I think of the quest as "the switch of virtual reality".

Developer reactions are good

Ru Weerasuriya, CEO of Ready At Dawn Studios, said in an interview that he agrees with this idea, which is why his company continues to create virtual reality games. Lone Echo II from Ready At Dawn will be released on an Oculus Rift platform in 2019, and the company has already been praised for its previous Rift, Lone Echo, Echo Arena and the upcoming Echo Combat titles.

"Oculus is only three years old on the market and already has three platforms," ​​said Weerasuriya.

Of course, this has a disadvantage. Facebook VR devices are not sold well. Sony launches a console every five years or so because the machines are sold in tens of millions of units and the stable platform offers developers a good target.

The VR has been slow to take off, at least compared to expectations, since modern helmets began to arrive in 2015 and 2016. During a slow period, the launch of new helmets more often is less risky. The virtual reality and augmented reality projects will grow this year, the IDC projects, which are expected to reach 12.4 million units in 2018, compared to 8 million in 2017. In 2022, IDC forecasts sales of 68.9 million euros. VR and AR helmets.

As always, VR has its optimists.

"I believe that [the Quest] is certainly in line with the Switch in terms of sustainability, "said Anshel Sag, an analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an email. "I've always considered Santa Cruz / Quest as the target device and the Facebook format. This gives them the performance and control of the user experience that the Rift can not have thanks to the Windows and PC manufacturers. That's why I think they are able to draw as much performance from the 835, they have been optimizing for this chip for years. They want that to be what developers are targeting first and foremost. "

It's not a given that Ready At Dawn's PC-based VR games can be adapted to run on the quest. The Quest has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor, a chip from the 2017 era that performs better than the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processors. A PC-based machine will always have big benefits in terms of performance compared to something like the Quest.

"Oculus has a good, better and better strategy for its platforms," ​​said Clifton Dawson, CEO of Greenlight Insights, in an interview. "It complicates game management for the medium. There is now a small universe of content creators in VR. But the advantage is that the investment of time and resources is channeled to a more restricted developer universe. Guiding them through the choices becomes critical. Developers may have to choose Rift or Quest. Partners will have to work together sooner. Challenges for independent developers will remain in the short term. "

Some developers like to take such risks. Robin Hunicke, CEO of Funomena, said in an interview, "Look at the Nintendo Wii. Were people worried that he did not have the processing power of Xbox or PlayStation? Nintendo never has this problem. They make great games. They are good for the family. They have fantastic franchises and they build things that work. It's not that difficult to put together and it's fun to play with. "

Funomena's playful game, Luna, debuted on RV Rift and HTC Vive in 2017. It has been featured on several platforms, including PSVR this fall. Hunicke enjoys working with platform owners on emerging platforms such as the Rift.

"We saw VR as a hardcore market because of the hardware factor, where you need a big PC to make it work," she said. "This is no longer the case. It will be really interesting to see if marketing executives – who are squeezing the next commercials and ads over the next two years with this next set of headsets – will continue to rely on this crutch. "

The quest could therefore succeed as an accessible mass market device, especially if it is aimed at a larger gaming audience, said Hunicke.

"I would be delighted if there was the equivalent of Animal Crossing and Mario Kart on this new helmet," she said.

Alexis Macklin, analyst at Greenlight Insights, accepted. She stated that she believed that players would be more concerned with experiences, rather than with power processing or nice graphics. Pulling the strings of the heart or offering a Star Wars experience may be more important than watching the lawn swing into virtual reality, she said.

Bet on Star Wars fans

The quest will already have a big title coming from ILMxLAB from Disney and Lucasfilm, which will create a new original Star Wars VR story called Vader Immortal: a Star Wars VR series. The first of three episodes, part of the effort that gave birth to the VR experience of The Void, Star Wars: Secrets of the Empire, will debut in the spring with the launch of Quest. It's one of 50 titles available for launch, Zuckerberg said.

Mohen Leo, Director of ILMxLAB's immersive content, said in an interview, "As soon as we get our hands on Quest and we've tried it, you immediately understand that it's changing the way you live the world." virtual reality. One of the things about this experience, you can use a lightsaber. While knowing that you do not have to worry, you turn around, you wrap yourself in a cable and you stumble, it changes things. This allows you to dive deeper into the experience.

David Goyer, executive producer of Vader Immortal, and Colum Slevin, director of Oculus' experiments, also said that the main attraction of the quest is that it will allow players to turn 360 degrees while brandishing a lightsaber. And so, who cares whether this is not the highest graphic quality?

Of course, the quest has potential dangers. Its higher price is a problem. The Quest also runs at 72 frames per second, slower than the 90 frames per second of the Rift. It will be a strange target for developers. Artistic assets will also have to be different. The Star Wars title of Void, which requires you to carry a backpack with a computer on your back, will not run on Quest.

User friendly developer?

These differences made the Nintendo Wii difficult to develop at a time when competing systems, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, were very different animals in game development. At one point, after the beginning of its decline, the Wii lost developers because it was so unique.

Sean Liu, head of equipment management at Oculus VR, said in an interview with GamesBeat that developers will have to carefully choose the type of experience that they wish to offer. If they want high-end graphics with super realistic images, the Rift on PC (or maybe its successor) will be the right choice. But if 6DoF and mobility matter more, then the quest may be the right choice.

Developers can create their games in Unity or Unreal, the most popular game engines for virtual reality, and transfer them from Rift to Quest, or vice versa, without much difficulty, Liu said. Liu also noted that Quest will be able to access all the processor processing power available, as this is neither a phone nor a PC, and therefore has no d & # 39; other task to accomplish.

Carmack said in our brief conversation that there were "no Triple-A VR games now" and that no one was spending $ 100 million to develop such games. There are, however, Double-A or Single-A games. And if Quest sells twice as many units as the Rift, it will become the platform of choice for developers, Carmack said. This, in turn, will attract larger games and more developers.

He said Quest was meant for "very serious games, but it's hard to know if we have the line-up to do it." It took years to develop Triple-A games and the quest for if a long time again.

"The saving grace is that we can bring a lot of good Rift stuff," said Carmack.

Carmack, as he is used to as one of the legends of the gaming industry, is franker than he should be. But I think he and the others see the opportunity properly. Making VR change is a viable strategy.