Mint Virtual Reality

The Oculus Quest is, despite what your heart may desire, not a wireless Oculus Rift. The launch lineup is shaping up to include a lot of the Rift’s best titles, but many of them have been downgraded or adapted to fit onto the standalone Oculus Quest. Creed: Rise to Glory is a great example of some of the sacrifices developers may need to make in order to cram their high-fidelity VR games onto hardware designed around a mobile chipset.

For what it’s worth, Creed: Rise to Glory is still a feature-packed VR boxing game that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, son of iconic Rocky movie franchise character, Apollo Creed. Between a decent tier-style campaign mode, lots of training exercises, simple freeplay setups, and a competitive PvP mode, there are lots of ways to get your sweat on with some virtual boxing fun.

Before we go much further, this is what we had to say about the original, Rift version of  Creed: Rise to Glory, when it launched last year:

Creed: Rise to Glory is the best all-around boxing game VR has seen yet. While its serviceable campaign mode lacks the depth and variety that we’ve come to expect from Survios releases and some of the controls are a bit finicky, it more than makes up for it with a litany of training mini games and an addictive PvP mode. Trading blows, ducking shots, and scoring a powerful knockout against someone in immersive VR is about as close to an actual boxing match as you can find from the comfort of your own home.

Here is a GIF showing off my smooth moves against none other than Rocky Balboa. Please note that this is a highly-compressed GIF:

I won’t spend a ton of time talking about the game as a whole — you can read that original review for more details on that — but instead will focus on how this port differs from the original version. To be clear, this is the entire game. Survios managed to jam the whole experience onto the Oculus Quest with all of its game modes and fighters included. That alone is quite admirable. Unfortunately, the game suffers as a result.

For starters, the visual downgrade is a bit jarring. Textures are mostly flat with far less lighting to enhance things and fighters are just way less detailed when they get up in your face. The environments surrounding the rings feel empty and barren for the most part and it’s all around a major downgrade that’s noticeable if you’ve ever played the original. It’s honestly to the point that the art style just doesn’t flow right without the higher fidelity visuals.

Then when it comes to performance the Quest really struggles to keep up. Creed is a very fast game that requires quick reaction time, lightning fast reflexes, and the ability to move around and respond without hesitation. But that’s hard to do when the game chugs, drops frames, and has trouble keeping things flowing in the heat of a fight. Out of all the full games and demos I’ve tried on Quest so far, and that number is well over a dozen at this point, Creed may have the worst performance.

Thankfully it isn’t a consistent problem. It seems to warm up after a fight or two and smooth out some, oddly enough. Some fights didn’t have any performance issues, while others did. It was hard to figure out what exactly caused it and when it did happen it was noticeable enough to impact gameplay ever so slightly, but not so bad that it was unplayable. The core fun factor is still there, but it’s hampered a bit.

The biggest issue for me with Creed on Quest is how the tracking limitations of just four front-facing Insight cameras is never gonna be as good as a full roomscale setup for the original Rift, or even four Rift S with its five surrounding cameras. Most notably Quest had trouble keeping up when I wanted to block.

I don’t consider myself a great boxer by any means, but I’ve been to boxing gyms and have received instruction from actual boxing coaches and sparred with people that know what they’re doing. As a result, I can tell you with certainty that one of the first things you learn is to always keep your hands up and protect yourself. Well, that’s tough to do on Quest because if your hands are in front of your face and too close to the tracking cameras then the headset loses tracking and you’re a sitting duck to your opponent.

The workaround I figured out was to keep my hands a few inches in front of my face, sort of floating there, and the game interprets that as a good blocking position when in reality it feels like I’m trying to hug someone. Creed on Rift is exhilarating and realistic, but Creed on Quest feels like an exercise in trying to figure out how to avoid tracking issues.

Once you get used to retraining your brain in terms of how you play, Creed on Quest is still a ton of fun. The training mini games are still excellent, the music is great, and the huge cast of characters (including the Rocky Legends update) is fantastic. Playing as Apollo Creed and taking down Drogo as a rewriting of Rocky IV’s history left me very, very satisfied.

Final Score: 6/10 – Decent

Creed: Rise to Glory seems to be one of the most brutally downgraded games in the entire Oculus Quest launch lineup so far. While far from being unplayable, everything from the visuals, performance, and gameplay quality suffer in the switch from a PC-powered Rift to a standalone device like Quest. The meat of it all is still good fun and if you love the pre-installed demo when you get your Quest you’ll probably love the full game, but this is definitely not the same experience as the original incarnation.

Creed: Rise to Glory launches for Oculus Quest on May 21 when the headset releases. The game will be a cross-buy supported title so if you own it on Oculus Home for Rift you’ll have it on Oculus Quest too. You can read our review of the Rift version here. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score. 

Tagged with: Creed: Rise to Glory, Oculus Quest

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Dance Central VR was one of the real stand out demos that I tried at GDC last month. When I walked into that hotel suite and put on an Oculus Quest headset to be treated to the latest VR music experience from Harmonix, I was certainly excited.

Now that I’ve had some extended time with the Oculus Quest and a much larger and expanded pre-release Early Access version of Dance Central to mess around with, I’ve got much more robust impressions of the dancing game. While I am reserving final judgement for when I’m granted “full” access to the game, these are my thoughts thus far.

This entire review was conducted using the Oculus Quest version of the game in various rooms and environments, all standing in roomscale arrangements.

Dance Central VR is designed to be played in short bursts, but you can easily sink a few hours into at a time if you really want to. There isn’t really much of a story or campaign mode from what I can see, but instead it’s about more subtle progression and immersion. As you explore different areas of the dance club and various surrounding buildings you’ll meet different NPCs that want to dance with you.

Each of the characters have their own unique personalities and voices that really do feel distinct and meeting each of them is part of the fun. As you dance with them more and more you’ll unlock new wardrobe options for yourself, different cell phone skins, and even dialogue choices for your text conversations. It seems silly, but when I had new texts from my favorite characters it genuinely made me a bit excited, sort of like getting a text from a friend in real life. Even if it was just a stupid selfie the fictional character took at the club.

Harmonix aren’t doing anything fancy from an AI perspective to make these characters really feel real by any means, but small things like that made a big difference for me. It made me actually want to log back in just to see what’s going on.

The actual dancing bits were a lot of fun, if a little simple. Dancing is split between two difficulty modes, Normal and Pro, but I found myself wishing for something in between. Most songs were extremely easy to get 5-star ratings on your first try on Normal, if not your second. However playing songs on Pro, which offer far less guidance and change moves very quickly, was a bit overwhelming at first. You get used to it after a while, but a third option, or even a super high-end choice to not have any cue cards at all requiring choreography memorization, would have been great.

There will be 32 songs at launch in Dance Central VR, including:

• Bruno Mars ft. Cardi B — “Finesse (Remix)”
• The Chainsmokers ft. Daya — “Don’t Let Me Down”
• DJ Snake & Lil Jon — “Turn Down for What”
• Haddaway — “What is Love”
• Pitbull ft. Ne-Yo, Afrojack, & Nayer — “Give Me Everything”
• Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock — “It Takes Two”

Since I played on Quest the tracking did seem to have some limitations. A lot of dance moves ask you to spread your arms out wide and make a fist or twist them a certain way, but the tracking cameras seemed to miss those movements occasionally. The same goes for any sweeping gestures down below or up high. Generally if I made a conscience effort to keep my hands in front of me and not too far above, below, or to the side it didn’t matter, but you don’t want to be thinking about your hand placement around you when you’re trying to dance.

Visually it looks really good, but on the Quest I noticed some performance issues here and there. Frame drops were a problem during some songs and if the battery was running low (say 25% or lower) they seemed more frequent. I also perceived the fixed foveated rendering very obviously in Dance Central VR — something that was much less noticeable in other games.

Outside of dancing there is a wardrobe to customize your look, as well as multiplayer lobbies to queue up with other dancers. The social hub is a cool, fun place to hang out and talk, but then you can also have private dance battles with a variety of rulesets to pick from. You can even dance alongside a friend for co-op dances too so it’s not all competitive.

For players that want to get particularly serious about their dance moves there is also a studio. Here you can break down songs into their individual parts and dance moves and practice them in slow motion. The trainer will even show the arcs of your hand movements so you can clearly tell what you’re doing wrong. It’s a great training tool, but it never felt intense enough to really warrant that kind of belabored practice to me. I had more fun just dancing and acting silly.

Final Score: No Score Yet

As it stands, Dance Central VR doesn’t nail every move, but it more than sticks the landing when it comes to getting you moving and grooving to the beat of the music in VR. When you slide on a headset and let the music take over it’s genuinely easy to forget where you are in real life as you dance along to the rhythm. I’m a terrible dance, but Dance Central VR made me feel like I knew what I was doing. It’s got some technical hiccups and it’s a bit meandering in its focus, but the core mechanics are a lot of fun.

We’ll have our final verdict later on when the full game launches on May 21 for Oculus Quest and Rift S. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score. 

Tagged with: Dance Central, Harmonix, Oculus Quest

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It’s the first day for the Facebook Developer’s Conference (F8) and as expected it has not disappointed. There has been a massive double whammy announcement for virtual reality (VR) fans with the news that both standalone headset Oculus Quest and tethered upgrade Oculus Rift S will both be released on the same day, and that pre-orders are going live today.

Oculus is looking to cover all bases with these two new head-mounted displays (HMD). If you have a suitable PC then it’s the Oculus Rift S you’re after. And for those that don’t have a PC – or one that isn’t VR capable – then the Oculus Quest is your answer.

The company’s first all-in-one solution, Oculus Go, offering a neat entry-level path into VR. With Oculus Quest customers now have an upgraded option with full 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF), allowing them to fully move around a roomscale virtual environment thanks to Oculus Insight, the inside-out tracking system which uses the four wide-angle sensors on the front of the headset. Oculus Insight not only provides real-time tracking of the headset, but it also tracks the new Oculus Touch controllers for maximum immersion. It’s also the same solution used with Oculus Rift S.

With the original Oculus Rift now discontinued the Oculus Rift S is now the flagship device. Thanks to its PC connection the HMD will be able to provide experiences the Oculus Quest can’t, and thanks to a fifth sensor on the top of the headset provides an even greater tracking field for the controllers.

Both Oculus Rift S will retail for $399 USD while the Oculus Quest will come in two options. The 64GB model for $399 and the 128GB model for $499. Pre-orders go live today (30th April) with both available to purchase from 21st May in 22 countries. For US customers, Oculus’ retail partners include Amazon, Best Buy, Walmart and GameStop, online and in stores, with Best Buy also offering Oculus Quest demos on launch day. And then there are Currys PC World, FNAC, MediaMarkt, and more in the UK and EU.

Oculus has stated that Oculus Quest will have over 50 titles for its launch next month, with quite a few already confirmed. It’s certainly an exciting day for VR fans and as further announcements today are made, VRFocus will let you know.

via Mint VR

Facebook and Valve support VR for different reasons.

Valve’s Steam storefront is the dominant digital distribution store on personal computers. Virtual reality creates new markets for content which Valve can sell to PC owners via Steam.

Facebook’s relationship to people is reliant on platforms controlled by other companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. VR offers an opportunity for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to loosen its dependence on those companies.

I start there in my Rift S review for a few reasons.

First, Facebook set its embargo for Rift S reviews at 10:30 AM Pacific on April 30 — mid-way through its keynote at the F8 developers conference which started at 10 AM.

About two hours before my hands-on time with the Valve Index HMD last week, a representative from Valve emailed me to say the company shifted its embargo time from May 1 to April 30 at 10 AM Pacific. Any sense of rivalry between these companies is not imaginary. It is fact.

Second, it is apparent Facebook prioritized one consideration in its design of the follow-up to 2016’s Oculus Rift. Above all else, Rift S makes it easier for new VR buyers to sign up for an Oculus account, set up their headset, and get into a virtual world delivered by Facebook.

Easier Setup And Lower Cost

Before Rift S arrived at my home on Friday last week I disconnected three USB cords from my PC.

Each cord ran to a sensor for tracking movement of the original Rift and its Touch controllers. At its discontinuation this month, Rift cost more than $400 for a complete “room-scale” system if you wanted all three sensors. For me, that meant running two of the three USB cords taped to my ceiling with the sensors mounted high on my walls so they could spot movement in almost any direction from the outside-in.

Insight Tracking

Rift S moves to “inside-out” tracking via five cameras on the headset itself to erase the need for those extra USB ports on the PC. This is the same “Insight” system deployed on Oculus Quest (via four cameras on that headset) and in my experience setting up Guardian boundaries works just as quickly and smoothly across both systems.

I spent the last three years setting up Oculus Rift sensors in dozens of configurations, buying USB extension cords, drilling holes in walls and, worst of all, dealing with trial-and-error PC issues across desktops and laptops as a result of hooking up three sensors and a VR headset.

I don’t think I can overstate how much of a delight the out-of-box setup experience is with Rift S in comparison to the original. You’re still limited to a tracked area tethered by a cord to your PC, although now it’s five meters instead of just four. Thankfully, now it’s no longer a huge inconvenience to simply just move the VR play area by a few feet. And, if you wanted to go portable, the inside-out tracking system is more friendly to backpack PCs.

The Insight system makes it easier to use Rift S with laptops, lowers the minimum PC specification overall, and also erases the considerable amount of time needed to mount the sensors and set up the tracking in the Oculus software. And the cost? A whole “room-scale” Rift S system starts at $399 with a pathway over the lifetime of the headset made by Lenovo to lower that price much more than Rift ever could.

By most (but not all) measures, Rift S widens the door to PC VR to accommodate a larger set of PC customers than the original released in 2016.

Cross-Compatibility

The next priority apparent in the Rift S design is cross-compatibility with other Oculus content and hardware.

Rift S is a bridge between the original Rift and its considerable library of PC-based content and the new Oculus Quest standalone headset, which is Facebook’s true play for mainstream users. For example, both Quest and Rift S use identical second-generation Touch controllers.

I found it relatively easy in my testing on Rift S to accidentally hit the Oculus button on these controllers. That can be fixed with software to ignore those presses during fast movement. Unfortunately, though, I also found the battery compartment on the new Touch controllers came loose in my hand easily enough to ruin playthroughs in games like Beat Saber.

Competitive Gaming?

On the Rift S HMD two sensors point to the sides, another looks up on the top of the device, and two more point straight-forward. For those counting, that’s one more sensor than Quest and three more than the many Microsoft headsets, including the new HP Reverb. We haven’t had enough access to hardware like Valve Index or HP Reverb to make meaningful comparisons to the overall tracking experience on these new 2019 VR headsets yet. Anecdotally, and with the video below, you can see the same general — if slightly reduced — occlusion issues with Rift S as seen with Insight on Quest.

Some of the interactions in competitive zero-gravity games Echo Arena and Echo Combat involve doing things without looking at your hands, like grabbing onto walls and objects to your side or behind you. In Rift S, sometimes the grip on the wall would fall away when trying to hold it while turning to do other things. The headset doesn’t release until May 21 so there is still time for Ready at Dawn to improve the experience prior to launch. Will all competitive VR games get updates to account for the differences of Rift S inside-out tracking though? Probably not — so this is something competitive gamers should take into account if these types of interactions are key to your play style.

Visuals

Though my initial impressions of Rift S suggested so-called god rays were gone, after a couple days with the headset it is apparent those visual artifacts are drastically reduced compared with the original Rift — but not completely eliminated. The screen-door effect is dramatically reduced as well, but it is still there and the lenses still catch light in some distracting ways. I prefer the Rift S optical design to both the Vive and Vive Pro as well for the same reasons — reductions in visual artifacts compared with the earlier systems.

The frame rate of the display is reduced from 90 hz to 80 hz from Rift to Rift S, but I can’t say the difference is noticeable. What’s more noticeable, though, is the resolution improvement and overall clarity of the optics. The original Rift used dual OLED panels for a total resolution of 2160×1200. Rift S replaces it with a single LCD panel with a resolution of 2560×1440. To be clear about this — I personally wouldn’t go back to the original Rift (or Vive or Vive Pro) from Rift S for any reason.

One note though — Rift S features software adjustment for interpupillary distance (IPD). Its lenses are fixed at 63.5 mm from one another, which means Facebook says they are “best” for users with IPDs of between 61.5 and 65.5mm. I’m outside that range, I believe, on the high end. No matter if I left the software adjustment at the default or moved it outside the “best” range to 67.5, I didn’t feel like it had a noticeable effect on my visual experience.

With the Valve Index physical adjustment, though, I could move the slider and see millimeter by millimeter the effect on my stereoscopic vision. On Index, IPD adjustment had a dramatic effect on my perception of depth and clarity. Rift S didn’t. I haven’t had enough time with the Index headset, though, to say anything more definitive about these differences.

Sound

Rift S uses an open-ear sound design that incorporates audio into the head strap. This means the audio experience should provide more comfort, generally, compared with any designs which touch the ears. This design should also make it easier to hear things from two realities — while also letting people nearby hear what’s going on in the virtual world. There’s a 3.5 mm headphone jack for folks who want to add headphones for private audio.

Two days before Rift S arrived at my house, I put on Valve Index and let the near-field speakers hover right outside the surface of my ears as I played Beat Saber. This effectively destroyed my first impressions of Beat Saber in Rift S. All I could do in Rift S was remember the things I heard in my Index demo that I couldn’t hear in Facebook’s new PC VR headset. And the Valve design still allowed me to hear things from two realities with the same level of off-ear comfort.

Conclusion

I believe Rift S to be a generally better overall experience than Vive Pro, Vive and the original Rift for only $400. I couldn’t have torn down those original Oculus sensors any faster.

There are notable caveats, though, for people with unusual IPDs or those who spend many hours in one specific virtual world that depends on some behind-the-back gestures which might escape the Insight tracking system. If that’s you, you might wait for developers to further optimize their apps for this new tracking system before upgrading.

Also, when it comes to Rift S vs. Index, or even Rift S versus HP Reverb or Pimax, we can’t make any more definitive recommendations just yet due to lack of significant time with those other pieces of hardware.

Rift S, then, continues the legacy set by its predecessor in accessing the largest and highest quality PC content library available from both Oculus and Steam. The headset won’t work in the dark, which is a bummer, but the convenience of the setup should reduce store returns and smooth out the overall experience of donning a PC VR headset.

Tagged with: facebook, oculus rift s

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Today at the F8 2019 developers conference, Facebook have announced that both the standalone Oculus Quest VR headset and the new Oculus Rift S VR headset are releasing on May 21, 2019 and are available for pre-orders starting today. You can pre-order the Quest directly from Oculus here or pre-order the Rift S directly from Oculus here. Both headsets will cost $399, but the Rift S also requires a VR-capable PC to power it.

You can read our full, detailed reviews of both headsets on the site now — Facebook sent us review units of both headsets. Our Oculus Rift S review is here and our Oculus Quest review is here. We’ve also got technical breakdowns of the Rift S here and Quest here.

Every Oculus Quest retail unit (both the 64GB and 128GB models) will come pre-loaded with five VR game demos, in addition to the standard offering of things like TV apps and Oculus Videos. The five VR game demos are Beat Saber, Creed, Journey of the Gods, Space Pirate Trainer, and Sports Scramble. It does not sound like Quest will come bundled with any full games at launch other than free experiences like Rec Room that will be available for download. You can see the full list of all 50+ planned day one launch titles for Quest right here.

There will also be a $40 travel case custom-made to fit your Oculus Quest, two Touch controllers, and charging cables.

Both of these VR headsets are powered by Facebook’s new Insight tracking system which uses cameras on the headsets themselves to track the room and your movement through it. They also both use the exact same Touch controllers to let you operate your hands inside the virtual space.

The biggest difference here is that the Oculus Quest is a totally self-contained device that functions in a standalone capacity. That means you don’t need a phone, game console, or PC to power it at all. However, you’re sacrificing power and fidelity for that freedom. So even though you can set it up easily and quickly in any room at your home or take it to another location by just stuffing it in a bag, it will never equal the power of a PC-powered device.

Then the Rift S is Oculus’ successor to their flagship Rift headset. They’re discontinuing the original Rift and replacing it with the Rift S so you no longer need to setup cameras and you get a decent bump in resolution as well, but the tracking suffers a tiny bit since the cameras on the headset have limited range when it comes to reaching your hands out wide, behind your back, or behind your head.

Stay tuned at UploadVR for more coverage of the Rift S and Oculus Quest in the weeks leading up to launch and keep an eye on our list of cross-buy titles if you’re interested in both platforms. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!

Tagged with: F8, Oculus Quest, Ocuus Rift S

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Well, it’s official. The Oculus Quest launches on May 21 and you can pre-order your very own standalone VR headset starting today. We’ve got more details on that news here as well as our full, thorough review of the headset itself already right here.

When you open up your Oculus Quest on May 21 and put it on for the very first time, it’ll have five demos ready to go for Beat Saber, Creed, Sports Scramble, Journey of the Gods, and Space Pirate Trainer. But I think it’s safe to assume you’ll probably be hungry for more before long, which is where the 50+ launch titles come in.

According to Facebook this exact list might change by the time May 21 rolls around, but for the most part this is the Day One lineup you can look forward to on launch. Personally? I think it’s impressive. Especially if you’ve never owned a PC VR headset before.

Here’s the full list ordered alphabetically, as well as that snazzy sizzle reel from a few weeks ago:

1. Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, Resolution Games
2. Apex Construct, Fast Travel Games
3. Apollo 11, Immersive VR Education
4. Bait!, Resolution Games
5. Ballista, High Voltage Software
6. Beat Saber, Beat Games
7. Bigscreen Beta, Bigscreen VR
8. Bogo, Oculus
9. Bonfire, Baobab
10. Box VR, Fit XR
11. Creed, Survios
12. Dance Central, Harmonix
13. Dead and Buried 2, Oculus Studios
14. Drop Dead: Duel Strike, Pixel Toys
15. Electronauts, Survios
16. Epic Roller Coasters, B4T Games
17. Face Your Fears 2, Turtle Rock Studios
18. First Contact, Oculus
19. Fruit Ninja VR, Halfbrick
20. Guided Tai Chi, Cubicle Ninjas
21. I Expect You To Die, Schell Games
22. Job Simulator, Owlchemy Labs,
23. Journey of the Gods, Turtle Rock Studios
24. Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes, Steel Crate Games
25. Moss, Polyarc
26. National Geographic VR Explore, Force Field VR
27. Nature Treks, Greener Games
28. Ocean Rift, Dr. Llyr Ap Cenydd
29. Oculus Browser, Oculus
30. Oculus Gallery, Oculus
31. Oculus TV, Oculus
32. Oculus Video, Oculus
33. Orbus VR, Orbus Online
34. PokerStars VR, LuckyVR
35. Racket Fury: Table Tennis, Pixel Edge Games
36. Rec Room, Against Gravity
37. Robo Recall, Drifter Entertainment
38. RUSH, Binary Mill
39. Shadow Point, Coatsink
40. Skybox VR Video Player, Source Technology Inc
41. Space Pirate Trainer, I-Illusions
42. Sports Scramble, Armature Studios
43. SUPERHOT VR, SUPERHOT Team
44. The Exorcist: Legion VR, Developer Wolf & Wood, Publisher Fun Train
45. Thumper, Drool
46. Tilt Brush, Google
47. Ultrawings, Bit Planet Games
48. Vader Immortal, ILMxLab
49. Virtual Desktop, Virtual Desktop, Inc.
50. Virtual Virtual Reality, Tender Claws
51. VR Karts, Viewpoint Games
52. VRChat, VRChat
53. Wander, Parkline Interactive

We’ve also got an ongoing list of  games that will be cross-buy between Rift and Quest too, which you can expect to be updated as more confirmations roll out.

Tagged with: Oculus Quest

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Last Saturday I pulled Oculus Quest over my eyes, booted up Fast Travel Games’ Apex Construct and played until the battery was flat. It lasted two hours and 50 minutes from full charge. In that time I had four instances of the device momentarily losing head tracking and two instances of the Oculus Touch controller tracking drifting or jumping unexpectedly.

Other than that, I played a fully intact PC VR game on a standalone headset. The visual fidelity had taken a significant hit but was far from unsightly. The freedom to twist and turn in VR without worrying about wrapping my legs in wires was liberating and, for the vast majority of the experience, the tracking performed in-line with current PC VR standards.

Quest has its fair share of caveats, then. A VR enthusiast that’s owned an HTC Vive or Oculus Rift for the past three years is unlikely to be swayed by its limited processing power and somewhat compromised tracking. But for the audience that’s sat on the sidelines since 2016, waiting for VR’s various barriers to come tumbling down, Oculus Quest is the real deal.

Diligent Design

 

Quest is a standalone VR headset. That means that everything it needs to run is already built into the device. No PCs, no smartphones, no consoles; $399 gets you all you need to jump right into VR. As such, it’s heavier than a Rift; my scales told me Quest weighs in at 580g compared to Rift’s 470g. Having spent extensive time with both, though, I couldn’t really notice the difference. If anything, the padded lining faceplate on Quest makes it more comfortable to wear than Rift’s more rigid alternative.

There are some nice additions to the design, too. The head strap, for example, expands and retracts from the hinges, giving you room to pull it on and then have it fit to your head without adjusting it every time. That said, the tough rubber strap can dig into the back of your head over time, similar to how the top of your head can hurt when wearing headphones. It took a fair bit of fiddling to find the perfect balance but, once I got there, Quest felt great on my head.

Specs And Stuff

On paper, Quest is about in-line with what you’d expect from a mobile VR headset in 2019. Its 1,440 × 1,600 per-eye is an appreciated step up from the original Rift but far from a revolution, with the gaps between pixels still clearly visible once you’ve acclimatized to the device. Small text is definitely easier to read but don’t expect an eye-opening jump. Audio, meanwhile, adopts the same excellent design from 2018’s Oculus Go. There’s a pair of built-in speakers that allow you to play at a volume that suits you but also hear what’s going on in the world around you.

A three-hour battery life might not sound too impressive for Quest. But, in practice, I found this accommodated the headset pretty well. Many of VR’s best games simply aren’t designed for three hours of straight play. One way or another, they’re too intensive (I certainly had to push myself to stay inside for three hours of Apex Construct). My bigger concern is with the two hours it took to fully charge the device again once flat; Quest is a device that will require constant access to a charge port if you’re planning to play regularly.

As with Rift and Go before it, Quest is a sleek package from top to bottom. But, for once, we’re not really here to talk about display and audio, are we?

Inside-Out Tracking Triumphs

One of Quest’s main draws is its new inside-out tracking system, dubbed Oculus Insight. Whereas the original Rift used external sensors to track your headset and controllers in physical space, Quest has four cameras mounted onto the device itself. Oculus reasons that the shift to inside-out is so compelling that it’s even refreshing the original Rift with this style of tracking.

Quest makes a good case for the switch. The vast majority of the time you’d be hard-pressed to find a difference. Pretty much all of the content I’ve played on Quest so far (about six different games) has been perfectly compatible with Quest. In Beat Saber, I slashed my way through Escape on Expert (in No Fail, I’ll admit) without being able to tell the difference. In Space Pirate Trainer I shot for the same high scores with as much success as I’d have anywhere else. Even in Superhot VR I was able to slowly navigate a spray of bullets whilst reaching for weapons just out of sight. I’d assumed Quest wouldn’t be able to handle those actions, but it worked nine times out of ten.

As I mentioned up top, I played a near three-hour session inside the headset with six noticeable blips in performance. That’s definitely less than I’d encounter with, say, Sony’s single-camera PlayStation VR tracking, but also six more than I would with my SteamVR or original Rift setups.

…And Turmoils

Putting the tracking through stress testing does reveal its flaws, though, as the video above reveals. Quest’s camera can’t track behind you so, if you’re reaching around your back, the headset won’t know where your hands are. Oculus uses prediction algorithms and other sensors in the Touch to estimate where it might be but they’re not perfect. I could bring my hand from behind my head suddenly back to the center of the screen only for the Touch controller to appear when I stopped moving. Quickly swiping my arms from side-to-side often didn’t get picked up, either.

These troubles can manifest themselves in some games. In Journey of the Gods I had issues reaching up to the skies to snatch a bolt of lighting, for example. The controllers also struggle with getting up close to the headset, starting to jitter. Creed: Rise to Glory works well when punching, but holding my hands up to my face to defend myself saw my gloves drift slightly.

I even jumped into my Quest early one morning and wondered why I couldn’t get the tracking to work. I took the headset off and found myself bathed in a ray of warm sunshine, concentrated through my window. If I turned my back on it, the headset worked fine but I had to wait until the sun had passed to get the proper experience.

These shortcomings may have serious implications for future VR design. Many of today’s best VR titles should be able to cope just fine, but it’s hard to imagine the 360-degree gameplay of something like Lone Echo handling as well. If Quest takes off as many hope it does, will we see VR games made with these limitations in mind?

Guardian Angel

With this change in tracking comes a new means of staying safe in VR. Quest uses the same virtual barrier system, named Guardian, as seen on Rift. Get near the edges of your play space and blue borders will appear to let you know. But Quest’s passthrough camera evolves the system in two important ways. Firstly, it makes setup incredibly easy. Once you switch Quest on it will scan the environment for pre-established Guardian boundaries. If it doesn’t find any, it asks you to make them again. Doing so is as simple as putting on the headset and drawing a line with your Touch controllers around the area you can play in. You will occasionally have to redraw the area as it drifts out of its original position, but it’s not a big issue.

It’s wonderfully simple. Better yet, if you do step outside those barriers then the passthrough system automatically activates, showing the world around you. It’s intuitive to a degree VR hasn’t really enjoyed before. Previous setup systems were complicated and easily confused. With Quest, anyone that puts on a headset for the first time can be up and running in seconds. Better yet, if someone’s using the space you want to play it you can just find another one.

PC VR, Minus The Performance

While Quest might not need a $1000 PC to run, it’s an inescapable fact that its Snapdragon 835 mobile hardware can’t afford the same kind of performance seen on Rift. In many cases I’ve seen, VR developers have done a tremendous job optimizing their once processor-intensive games for much leaner hardware. Superhot VR feels as sharp as ever, for example, as does Beat Saber. Stack them side-by-side with the PC counterparts and it will be clear which looks better, but once inside Quest it’s hard to tell.

But sometimes the cutbacks feel a little too much. Survios’ port of 2018 boxing hit Creed: Rise to Glory has the playable fundamentals down, but the load times are ugly as is the reduction in textures.

It’s telling, too, that Oculus Studios’ own genuinely ‘new’ Quest games, Journey of the Gods and Ballista, adopt cartoonish, simplistic art styles that do away with the intricacies of photorealism. Again, Quest’s potential to sell more than its PC VR contemporaries could mean we start seeing a lot of VR developers adopting less graphically rich games in the future.

Fixed Foveated Rendering

Foveated rendering is a promising avenue for the future of VR. It’s a technique in which a headset only fully renders a certain part of its display, taking some of the pressure off of processing. Ideally, it would be paired with eye-tracking, allowing the device to see where you’re looking. Like Oculus Go, though, Quest uses fixed foveated rendering. There’s no eye-tracking, so the headset instead simply blurs the edges of the screen in hopes you won’t realize.

Unlike Go, though, I noticed the foveated rendering far more in Quest. Or, rather, I noticed it far more in some Quest apps. In some games like Beat Saberit isn’t perceptible. Again, though, Creed was the giveaway.  In the game’s opening training montage I couldn’t help but point my eyes down and see two blurs for feet running on a treadmill. Tilting my head up over text  to move it into the foveated area revealed the scale and size of the effect. It renders fully right in the center and gets increasingly blurrier as you move closer to the edges of the display. You can see the effect in these images captured directly from the headset.

I’ve found the technique to range from incredibly distracting to occasionally noticeable. Creed is the main offender, yes, but it also caught my eye in games like Journey of the Gods and Apex Construct. It’s a necessary evil to get some of PC VR’s bigger games onto the headset but problematic all the same.

Conclusion

Oculus Quest is mostly successful in its mission to make VR as accessible as possible in 2019. If you’re a VR enthusiast that already owns a bleeding edge PC headset then this is not the device for you. But, if you’ve sat on the sidelines for the past three years longing for a chance to play Beat Saber and Superhot VR, this is your best bet. When Quest is at its best (and it often is), it delivers an experience so close to PC VR you won’t care about the difference.

And yet, for all its advances, Quest likely still isn’t enough to truly take VR mainstream. Its limited mobile hardware and occasional tracking glitches hold the system back, as does the usual array VR caveats like display resolution. Could it expand the audience beyond the niche group that enjoys VR now? Absolutely. Is it VR’s iPhone moment? Probably not. For now, though, that might be just enough.

 

Tagged with: Hardware review, Oculus Quest

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via Mint VR