Oculus announced that its Project Santa Cruz virtual reality headset will ship next year as the $400 Oculus Quest, and we got to try out several new game titles on the Quest. We got some hands-on time with the Quest to see if the Rift-level VR without wires is a possibility.
The future of virtual reality is finally upon us, and it looks fantastic. Two years ago at its developer conference, Facebook teased a wireless VR future in the form of Project Santa Cruz. This year, at Oculus Connect 5,CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the final evolution of the project: Oculus Quest. It comes out in Spring of 2019, offering Rift-quality games without wires, but we got some hands-on time with the headset to see if it lived up to that promise.
Like the bigger Rift, Quest is designed to deliver a PC-like gaming experience with high fidelity audio, and powerful graphics. However, unlike the Oculus Go, which Facebook debuted earlier this spring, Quest is also capable of spacial tracking in a package that’s completely designed for mobile thanks to a new technology called Oculus Insight. Insight, which took more than two years to develop, swaps out the Rift’s external sensors to track your movements in the virtual world with four front mounted cameras on the headset. These cameras allow you to play games in a smaller space like a New York City apartment — or a larger space like the living room of a larger home.
“There’s no external tracking accessories,” Oculus Quest product marketing manager Allison Berliner explained of Insight during an interview at Oculus Connect. “Everything you need is onboard. And because Oculus Insight is so robust, you can really have a precise and accurate experience in VR almost anywhere.”
Whereas Rift relies on powerful computer processors and graphics cards to deliver an immersive VR experience, Oculus claims that it can bring the same high quality experience to Quest on more mobile hardware. Not only does Quest shed the cables for a truly immersive experience — you’re not “chained” to anything from the physical world as you navigate the virtual world — but the headset ships with a mobile processor more commonly found on smartphones. In fact, Quest relies on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835, a processor that’s found on last year’s Samsung Galaxy S8.
Berliner explained that even though the Quest relies on the Snapdragon 835, the performance is still top-notch because Oculus is building the headset just for VR. “And because we’re owning so much of the stack, we can get so much out of that,” she said. “What goes into the overall experience is much more than just compute. A lot of it comes down to things that are totally unique to VR — the immersion, the presence, and the interaction that comes from touch. We are bringing the best learnings, the best practices, to Oculus Quest.”
At Oculus Connect, through several game titles that were developed by Oculus’ in-house studio, Facebook created demos to showcase what Quest is capable of. Early titles — the demo staff claims that most of these games should be available for consumers to purchase in the future — include first-person shooter Superhot VR, a sports-oriented Project Tennis Scramble, a fear-filled Face Your Fear adventure, and Dead and Buried, a VR twist on laser tag.
Thanks to clever tuning, the results were impressive. We came into Facebook’s demo expecting lags, screen door effects, and a low-quality experience, but we were left completely blown away by our experience with Quest. The resolution for each eye is 1,600 x 1,440, which is a meaningful upgrade over the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, which have a resolution of 1,080 x 1,200 per eye.
