Oculus Quest

GADGET REVIEW


Unlike the Oculus Go that came just before it, the Quest headset will offer six degrees of freedom tracking that will allow you to walk around anywhere without a wire holding you back while still allowing lateral movements, crouching and jumping. That freedom is great but it comes at a cost: to some extent, the Oculus Quest is less powerful than an Oculus Rift, that requires an Nvidia 960 GPU or better to operate. But that doesn't mean it’s running on half-baked hardware – Oculus Quest is a mobile VR headset that looks almost as good as its tethered counterpart. The reason it costs what it does is that the Oculus Quest is a standalone headset. That means, for both better and worse, all the processing power the headset needs is baked right in. But, while you won’t be able to upgrade the headset two years down the road like you can with your PC-based Oculus Rift setup, Oculus Quest is a headset that goes where you go. To keep you from walking too far, and to track the new-and-not-so-improved Touch controllers, the Quest uses four ultra-wide sensors located along the outer edges of the headset. The sensors act like smaller versions of those that come with an Oculus Rift – allowing the headset to track where your hands are, even if it loses sight of them for a few seconds. One shown off at Oculus Connect 5 was called Project Tennis Scramble which feels a bit like Wii Sports for the VR era. A number of developers we spoke to on the show floor mentioned that standalone VR was going to be a focus for them moving forward and that the headset would enable unique experiences that wouldn’t be possible with wires.

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