I imagine they have done research on how much people care about using it without the power cable plugged in vs. the weight of a larger battery. Even for portable use, it might be better to use an external USB C power pack than have a large battery on your head.
There's an official accessory strap with battery now, if battery is a problem. Helps with balance, I've done a similar setup with a 3D printed bracket and a power bank.
$300 is a pretty big deal for pricing on a VR headset, that feels very different from $400 for wide adoption.
Seems like this is also the end of the road for Rift, the Quest 2 is lower cost, more pixels, and they mentioned 90 hz screens for PCVR games over Link.
Really though? Facebook makes money by displaying targeted ads to users. What data from the Quest is being used to target ads? I’m not familiar with anything related to this in Facebook’s product for ad buyers, and can’t think of anything particularly useful that they could be doing.
You could think of Oculus as an effort to increase the amount of user attention inventory Facebook has in supply to rent out to advertisers. Also, they are positioning themselves as an intermediary for transactions in the future VR economy by being platform owner (a la Apple owning the App Store). My guess is the long-term plan is to make money here by displaying ads in VR and by getting a cut of goods and services sold though VR (see: Ready Player One).
What is it with HN and trying to read between the lines so hard? There's literally an Oculus Store app store for quest games. Probably they are just making money on game sales, like every other game console has for 35 years.
I agree that being a game platform would be enough to be profitable, though their biggest dream must be to be the ultimate gatekeeper/taxman to what goes into your eyes. Aside from injecting thoughts right into your brain, what is more important than a screen that blocks out everything else you see? (phone, laptop, and TV are worth zero when you're wearing goggles).
I do worry that Facebook will figure they might as well double dip on sales and advertising; future headsets are probably going to have eye tracking (ostensibly for foveated rendering and better avatars), and combining in-world advertising with exact data on how long people looked at them is a pretty compelling sell for what is fundamentally an advertising company.
They spent like 15 minutes of the presentation talking about how ethical they're going to be (re: AR glasses) and how trust has to be earned, but their ethics track record isn't exactly stellar.
I’m skeptical the Facebook would bother to invest so many billions into VR just for the chance of being part of the competitive game console market. It makes sense to think about how it fits into the long-term strategy for their main cash cow, ads. If there’s a future where internet/app usage hours shift toward VR, Facebook doesn’t want to be left in the dust like Myspace when users switch to a new social network. Even if they can keep users on a Facebook-owned VR app, they don’t want to wind up paying a 30% tax to some platform owner.
I hope that the platform as a whole don't start stuffing ads everywhere, but I'd be shocked if there weren't some monitization plan for Facebook Horizon
> being part of the competitive game console market
You mean being part of the many billion dollar game industry by controlling the highest growth sector in that industry with vendor lock in and rent seeking for any game sold in that new market?
Sure, but that would also apply to other companies who could have bought Oculus. I think the way it fits into Facebook’s overall company strategy explains why they would bid the most.
Hmm, who would have bid more? Google has its own tech and doesn't like making content. Apple doesn't like making content and only recently got into original video content. Microsoft has its own tech.
I don't _think_ Facebook had a lot of computer vision expertise at the time and it makes sense they'd want to buy into that.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple all have launched gaming platforms, to varying degrees of success. I think any of them could have bought Oculus. While they all also have some degree of AR and/or VR tech, none of them have an Oculus-like product.
They could have but again, why? Each of those companies already have bigger hardware and software platforms and none of them are really behind Oculus in computer vision, so what would Oculus give those other companies?
Google (with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo) and Microsoft (with Hololens) had stand alone headsets before the Quest.
not to mention that VR is a completely new type of media, so not just games but virtual environmental presence which is gonna be a big deal in a world where carbon footprint and pandemics will make things like traveling for a festival become more expensive or impossible.
Again, why would FB want be the company that does that?
My guess: The simple answer is they want to be the VR platform of the future so they can show ads on it, however that may look. Selling ads in VR apps/games/homescreen is obvious - selling AR ads is probably on the horizon (so, if you look at your fridge in the Oculus Quest 5 AR you'll see an ad asking you to upgrade to the latest Samsung Fridge).
I kind of doubt we have anything to worry about now, but there is a terrifying future on the horizon where everything you look at, everything you do, is measured and any value is extracted and sent to ~~our new overlords~~ FB.
Zuckerbery has talked about the strategy here for ages. It's not about VR, it's about AR. The tech to build realtime, always on AR is just a more advanced VR tech.
AR will be all about the ads as facebook can serve them everywhere you go. That's where they will make $100BN in ad revenue.
Adblockers will require you to "jailbreak" your device and their installation/use will be against numerous terms of service agreements. Maybe they won't be illegal though, who knows
There could be some kind of lawsuit or legislation mandating that AR or VR platform owners provide access to third-party software (like how Microsoft was forced to offer other browsers back in the day).
I think they were sad they missed the boat on mobile and wanted to get in early on VR in case it gets big. Although a massive investment, for Facebook it was not that big a deal.
If it were truly just about the games, they would let you keep using Oculus login. Why else would they force you to use a Facebook login? If they only cared about store profits, logins wouldn't be required at all.
no idea if this is the reason but they are being pretty forward about banning malicious users (cheaters, creeps) and you can't do that effectively if you just ban the throwaway user.
Interesting. But don't you have to attach a credit card to buy and play the game? They can use that to identify repeat offenders and probably other things as well. Other platforms solved the issue without accessing my entire social graph.
Also remember that Mark Zuckerberg himself demoed the Samsung Oculus headset to everyone. That was a really big deal at the time. It's possible that this is a pet project he's adopted and really wants to see succeed. However, practically, it's a great jumping off point for AR and we know that Apple is experimenting with Augmented reality headsets that are tied to your phone.
Facebook might just be trying to get ahead of the game, betting that the next step past phones is VR/AR.
It's not just HN. I think it's pretty fair to be concerned about facebook's tracking, given the level they already go to on their site. I just spent $1000 on a Valve Index, since there is no way I am strapping 4 facebook linked cameras to my head.
You're thinking too small. By owning a Quest 2, you're signalling that you (or your parents) have disposable income they are willing to spend on electronic devices. Yes, it clearly shows you're a gamer. So if you're a gamer, you probably drink Mountain Dew and eat Doritos. Based on your FB profile, you probably like certain types of shoes. 75% of other people with matching criteria purchased something, so let's shove that in your face as well to see if we can't get it up to 80%. Oh, you play games between the hours of xxx, so you must be a teenager. Let's target ads to get your parents money.
Sure if that was the only data point. however, this is just one more thing they will use to refine the data they are sucking in about you every second. At this point, why would they not do it? It's in their DNA.
They may not be exposing the data they're collecting to ad buyers today, but it's a safe bet they're collecting it. You can extract a lot of signal on ad effectiveness based on what people look at via head pose, and once eye tracking is in - nominally for foveated rendering, of course - it will be even stronger.
What data?
Movement range, size, speed,reaction time.
With touch controllers you can even track the stress resistance, because people tend to tighten their grip if stressed.
And there a lots of companies like Cambridge Analytica that can use that data to push their agenda even better.
Easier game for people like the Koch brothers.
First it measures your fitness level. Those devices have high quality acceleration and gyroscope sensors. They could know your visual and acoustic acuity.
They measure what games you play, for how long, at what time.
With these data and processing done by AI created by engineers they can extract and know more about yourself than you do.
We know from Snowden that places like the NSA collect and save data expecting technological changes in 5-10 years in the future for processing that data. The technology for processing does not need to be ready yet.
This is extremely useful for Advertisers and secret services. This is not what you say you are, this is what you are.
That's a bit of a stretch. Facebook uses data to improve ad targetting on their own platforms. They're not selling your HR or fitness data to your insurance company or anything crazy like that.
Facebook generated $29 per user in the US last year. A small bit of extra info about people's gaming habits is not going to improve ad targetting enough to make up for a $100 gap in price.
Currently VR data is not very good for anything really yet, because we have no scalable way to understand it.
"raw" VR data is about 10 megabytes a second of black and white infrared video.
plus audio and position data of either controllers or hands.
After its been processed it can give you a sparse pointcloud of your living room (which is not overly bad) but thats not something thats done by facebook, yet. With a bit more work you could get a dense pointcloud.
Unlike AR which will need a bunch more processing on device to get position and geo data, VR is mostly just slam
They make it up by taking a 30% cut on any games you purchase through their store (which is the only place you can buy games for it), similar to consoles. This is much more money than user data is worth. (Not that they won't use/sell that data, too, but let's not confuse ourselves about how much it's worth.)
If you want to get down to a nit picky level like that then, sure. And to be fair, maybe it should be explicitly stated. However, Facebook sells access to the data it collects. It may not be access to the raw data that a phrase like 'selling the data' makes it sound. However, it is making money from the knowledge it has about people (can't even say its users anymore). Either way, the ad buyer (end user) gets access to that data even if it is a black box API style system.
They get the ability to target ads against people who match some characteristics. Facebook's business is literally built on advertisers inability to access that data. If they had access, advertisers would advertise elsewhere and Facebook wouldn't get a cut.
Which is in itself a huge problem in democratic societies as demonstrated e.g. by Cambridge analytica. I think the potential harm that this business model produces and the power it gives the companies who deploy them, is something our formerly nice working systems didn't really price in when the seperation of powers was invented.
So while protection of privacy is always also the right of one individual, I think it is crucial to realize that this kind of power over "the masses" isn't something any free society could afford in the long term on a systemic level. If we look at a democracy with it's separation of powers, it's institutions etc as a delicately balanced electronic circuit — which has the ability to self correct — players like Facebook are like the introduction of new feedback paths that work better for people who don't mind to sell their soul when abusing them. Of course such new connections will have an effect on the whole system, but the crucial point is, that nobody really considered what this effect might be and whether what we have and like in democracy can actually survive this.
You cannot have free elections if the people voting in it are put into their own matrix-esque simulation of reality. How could we ever find agreeable consent if our realities have no common overlap by design?
I think a lot of people in tech sphere don't really want to see this as they are profiting from this. It makes us powerful wizards who see more and understand more than others.
CA actually did get access to user data because they abused a loophole in the Facebook app API that let them grab all the details of not only people who used the app, but also every single one of their friends. They were also using data given to researchers by Facebook as part of a collaboration.
There isn't a loophole with the graph, it was designed for this and was used notably by Zygna and later the Obama campaign. When the campaign hoovered up everything in 2011/2012 and set off alarms, FB saw what they were doing and didn't hinder it. Instead they reached out them, stating that they're on the same side. Hopefully these links aren't mangled.
Here's the media championing it:
"How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection"
"Why are politicians now freaking out about a feature that has been publicly documented since its inception and that was discontinued three years ago?"
buying peoples data would be a big deal, that's why its not a nit picky detail. I also don't agree with facebook having all of my data in the first place but they don't just tar up my entire life and hand it to someone.
how much do you think FB would care about that, even if that data was actually uploaded (which it isn't because it would be extremely expensive for everyone involved).
C'mon, I get the hate but this is worst than tinfoil hat conspiracies.
You can also use things like ALVR or Virtual Desktop to stream Steam VR titles to the Quest. But yes, that still requires a VR capable PC and stable wireless connection.
I agree. I am a little a shocked how many games and VR experiences that I have bought for the Quest. The only other person I know who has one is my stepson (who did a “hard insist” that I buy one, and that was great advice) and he also buys a lot of games for his.
I worked on VR over 30 years ago. I am so happy to finally see great consumer VR gear.
The Rift is a VR head mounted display for a beefy PC. The Quest is an entire computer system powered by battery and tiny in surface area. They're different products for different markets. Anything in a mobile form factor as your VR computer will necessarily be limited for either shorter time periods or significantly less graphical fidelity.
Oculus Link[1] lets you render everything on the PC. The cable also provides power so you don't have to worry about battery life. The only disadvantage is the extra weight of the battery in the headset.
>We’re going to focus on standalone VR headsets moving forward. We’ll no longer pursue PC-only hardware, with sales of Rift S ending in 2021. That said, the Rift Platform isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we've seen significant growth in PC VR via Oculus Link, and the Rift Platform will continue to grow while offering high-end PC VR experiences.
So, yeah. End of the road for the Rift. Oculus Link makes it redundant.
Rift S is being discontinued, if you want a dedicated PC headset now you'll want to look at an Index or an HP Reverb G2.
But you can plug the Quest into a PC and use it as a PCVR headset. Oculus sells a 16 ft fiber optic cable for $80, but it works well over any good quality USB 3 cable (and even works over USB 2 now).
The downside of this is that it's more front heavy than a PC headset without all the standalone guts, and I'm sure there's non-zero latency for running the video stream over a USB connection rather than a standard video cable. It works pretty well though, I think the trade-offs are absolutely worth the benefits of having a standalone headset.
Also check out https://www.vrdesktop.net/ for PC streaming, this option works wirelessly and performs very well as long as you have a fast and stable wifi connection.
The version on the Oculus Store doesn't do SteamVR streaming though, you have to buy it and then sideload an alternate version (which still checks for a license from the store).
There's supposed to be some sort of easier sideloading system coming (currently you need to sign up for a developer account and enable developer mode), but no new info since that was announced a few months ago.
This is interesting, though I'm ready to move past the limitations of emulating real world single-screen setups. I want a virtual window manager where I can move and organize windows just like the desktop, but in 3D around me.
This was demo'd in the Facebook event today as something they are actively working on and making progress with. Seamlessly switch from VR (with browser or application window floating in a VR game/app) to passthrough camera into the real world (with the browser or application windows still floating in the exact same position in space.
Pixel density isn't as high as what you'll get on a real monitor, but having lots of them ought to help make up for it.
Carmack brought this up in his talk last night, apparently with the higher pixel count in the Quest 2 the quality is now limited by the fresnel lens optics, and they won't be able to just keep bumping the pixel count up to improve visuals. So it's not clear what the path is to higher quality VR is for them. People have made headsets with more exotic multi-element glass optical setups, but there are trade-offs for cost, weight, and likelihood of things breaking if you knock it off a table.
Yes, but with 30 ms additional latency on top of base latency for doing the same with a normal head mounted display. You can see confused questions about this all over the oculusvr forums.
So now you're tethered, your tether is more fragile, and you have significant extra latency.
Yes, serious PC VR gamers will probably want to look elsewhere, for me my gaming computer is mostly running flatscreen games and being able to enjoy games like HL: Alyx via Link is a bonus.
Standalone headsets are so much more convenient, and are affordable to people without a high powered gaming computer, so I see why Facebook is going in this direction.
There is latency and in VR latency is more noticeable to begin with than it is with normal gaming.
Also, there is a good amount of compression involved so the graphical fidelity takes a massive hit.
They claim that they are going to be improving both of these issues, but given that they still exist in largely the same state as they did with the Oculus Link Beta with the V1 Quest, people should be skeptical about how much improvement they are going to be able to accomplish. Carmack talked about some ideas on how it can be made better, but I don't know if he's still assisting them with anything at all.
I'm very happy with my v1 Quest, but its PC support has some significant drawbacks.
Replying to my comment because its too old to edit. Apparently Carmack is still somewhat involved and spoke at a recent Facebook event. He talked a bit about working on this problem. I'm hoping we see the results of Oculus' effort soon. I already like using it tethered to my PC, but if it can get significantly better that would be awesome.
He also mentioned he hopes they can eventually get an official wireless solution out to the public.
Tethering just feels like an bootstrapping niche. Appealing to those who already find gaming PCs appealing, obviously dovetailing with highly engaged gamers. But, tethering is never going to "win." Tethering for power makes current battery life OK, even the quest 1 is good enough.
Mass adoption, almost certainly, means an affordable all-in-one unit. We have enough history at this point (with home gaming) to know what the price range is. Oculus have been playing within that range.
Graphics/power is already (Quest1) good enough for a lot of games. An interesting part of the history of home gaming is that both "more is never enough" and "good enough is good enough" seem to be true. Lots of the most popular gaming products (games, consoles.. eg minecraft) did not push boundaries at all. OTOH, bleeding edge has always been highly relevant, especially for blockbuster games.
On balance, I don't think graphics is a (commercially) limiting factor for VR anymore. This makes a rift/tethered device kind of questionable. If it doesn't get mass adoption, and I don't think it can), it can't support the high end games that really need these graphics. The oculus product line strategy (whether accidentally or deliberately) seems clever. The rift is what you develop new games for. They will (hopefully) be portable to the next gen Quest.
Overall, I think the current game is all about weight/comfort and content. The current devices are heavy & sweaty. This one weighs just 10% less. Every gram counts, but I don't think this is a breakthrough. Content is the other factor. IMO, exercise apps still need to breakthrough. I'm surprised ankle controllers and heart rate monitors aren't a thing yet. I really think the right game & controllers with the current gen quest could become a breakthrough workout thing. A lot of current games are pretty physical, but I suspect you can get to a point where a 6 week game addiction makes you look visibly fitter... on par with a daily gym routine.
that's why Oculus is killing off Rift S. Because Quest can do the exact same thing, but also function as a completely standalone device, all for $299/$399. It is indeed a killer value proposition.
I do disagree there - the additional latency and compression artifacts are noticeable from some of the reviews of the Quest 1. I think the experience is still going to be better for graphically intensive games with a tethered headset.
There's multi-frame latency and compression artifacts involved in this. It's really disingenuous to say that a Quest 2 is unambiguously better than an actual PC VR headset
I'd compare the Quest 2 to Nintendo's Wii and Switch. It's probably a good platform for the few exclusive titles that have been designed from the ground up to work on the gimmicky controllers and below-than-average hardware specs.
The old Quest can play Steam games. The new Quest addresses Quest 1's performance issues. When Quest 2 is linked to PC, I doubt most people would notice any large differences from Quest 2 vs say WMR or older gen Vives and Rift.
I'm not sure why people think $400 is so expensive. You're buying two 1080p (or higher) miniaturized monitors, motion tracking, some fancy glass optics and a set of headphones. Honestly the experience is incredibly lousy if you don't spend quite a lot of money and that should be expected indefinitely.
Even the $400 price point of the previous generation standalone headset was probably already subsidized. They just turned up the "evil corporation kills all competition" dial.
Love my Quest but I basically only play Pavlov Shack, a game that requires sideloading and I am somewhat sure will not come to the official Quest store.
Will probably end up selling mine and getting another brand.
We develop industrial training solutions using the rift S and quest. But the deep linking with FB, the battery downgrades on the quest, etc, all are going to push us away.
For PC-based training sims, we'll probably get the HTC Vive. And the Pico for the quest equivalent.
You do need a FB account - and a real one at that. If you create a fake one and you get locked out and you can't prove you are that fake person FB will lock you out of the account (and all bought software).
It's fine to buy a product and expect it not to require an intrusive violation of my privacy to use it. I hope lawmakers will completely bar this practice for all devices.
Some features won't work without an FB account. No one is forcing you to buy this device, but if you do and want to utilize features that require a FB account then it is forced upon you
Couldn't someone set up a "business" that proxy-buys for a large number of people? There's obviously a decent market for non-facebook-login version of the Quest 2.
Genuine question - if this was the perfect AR/VR device, would you use it even though it is a FB product? I have real concerns about privacy and the need to log in with FB credentials, but I am also very hopeful for devices that can continue to grow the market and help take it mainstream.
A) An algorithm flags your newly-created account as "inauthentic" and now you have to submit a copy of your driver's license to Facebook just to use a piece of consumer electronics you bought.
B) A different algorithm puts the pieces together and deduces that your burner account is the same identity as the real Facebook account you stopped using years ago or perhaps even "deleted." Nothing escapes the big-data inferences of The Graph.
I don't know... Facebook hasn't detected a single one of my 6 fake facebook accounts, and I've had them for years. I have been using one of them with my Quest ever since I got it, and they still haven't caught on.
Maybe I'm slipping through their net because my accounts are old?
The problem with this, is that all your purchases in the Oculus store become tied to that account. So then if you build up a library worth perhaps hundreds or even thousands of dollars (as I already have), you are running the risk of losing it all if at any point in time Facebook flags your account. The only narrow path to mitigating this is if you buy everything through SteamVR but that really hugely limits your options, and it's not at all clear to me it would not also run into problems as Facebook could easily associate your Steam account to your fake facebook account.
No, you aren't. You're building a business-focused product that might share some similarity to the Quest 2. The hardware isn't what makes the Oculus a compelling consumer product.
Content, price, and experience. It's fun to talk about SoC's and pixel count, but at the end of the day those don't matter as much as we like to say that they do. You can have the most amazing hardware in the world, but if it's hard to get content made for said hardware, and it costs too much, and it's too difficult to use... then it will fail.
Facebook is doing the boring work that people don't like to talk about in tech forums, and that's why they're able to make a compelling consumer product.
The only other VR company that seems to get this is Sony, and they're married to a 6-8 year product cycle.
1. It can connect with your gaming pc wirelessly. Also battery driven, so completely wireless.
2. No base stations, only headset and controls
3. You can run many games directly on the device, so no gaming pc required for for example beat saber.
4. Portable, you can bring it to your friends place.
>So, when do you plan to "cut the price by a thousand dollars"?
Feels like a rude rhetorical question, but the answer is presumably at some point where their volume gets anywhere near HTC or Oculus, if that ever occurs.
Lynx is awesome. I pre-ordered my unit and looking forward to it. In your latest video update you mentioned the possibility of licensing and white labeling the headset. Who is the best contact to talk about options?
Sorry to ask an annoying question, but do you have any kind of timeline for when this will ship?
It's depressing though how far apart the price point is from what Facebook can pitch it at. I am interested in use cases that would fit out an entire team with headsets but it's a non-starter at $1k+ and completely viable at $300 per headset. Made worse, sadly, by COVID where sharing equipment b/w team members is now pretty unlikely to be viable so we really need 2x the hardware.
> that is doing so much to hurt democracy worldwide
what makes you think that facebook hurts democracy? Weren't democracy hurt way before facebook due to TV, radio, newspaper, and whatever was the communication mean of the day? I think a lot of people are over reacting here. If anything, FB helps against wannabe dictators, see how critical everybody is of Trump? Without social networks I think it'll have been much easier for Trump to make the US a dictatorship.
no? It's pointing out that there needs to be general solutions to these problems that don't just point the finger to the latest communication mean, this is lazy
Not as long as Valve still wants to be a player in the VR device space. The Index has had an 8+ week wait to receive one for several months now because they keep selling out, despite the $1,000 price tag for the full kit.
If Facebook is going to be the market, and I believe it will be judging by what's out there right now, VR on the whole as a market is dead to me. Since the facebook linking account news I've removed all VR news blogs from my RSS feed. I don't need to know about what's happening in the industry anymore.
If the only way to avoid Facebook is to not play, I'm not playing. It's just that simple.
Yes, the Quest 1 was such a game-changer for me that I would sell my soul to get the next generation. Really hoping other companies will step up their game though.
What's the privacy concern here ? Facebook knows what I do in VR ? I don't necessarily want that but TBH I don't really care about it either - I don't plan on using it for anything compromising anyway and I'm bombarded by advertisement spam everywhere to the point of immunity.
I mean this is a toy you put on for leasure (a tool at best but at that point you'll probably invest more money and not use a FB product) if it's not a satisfactory experience I stop using it
If they've got eye tracking, they know basically how your visual cortex behaves – and hence how to put stuff where you look at it. That'll get infuriating very quickly.
They'll also know what gets your attention, what doesn't… unless you can control your saccades, that'll leak a lot of information about your mind-state while viewing Facebook-controlled media. They could, if they wanted to, blackbox reverse-engineer bits of you via controlled-input attacks.
VR headsets are basically the most creepy thing they could be tracking my behaviour with – perhaps second to the smartphone, since at least I can take off the VR headset.
It's not just knowing what I do in VR. It's also seeing and hearing into my house, because they have provisions for scenarious in which they would keep full sensor data indefinitely.
Will they be running automatic object detection/classification on the video streams?
Is that a completely legal firearm/sword in the background? Is that a MAGA hat on the desk? Care to explain that Antifa flag on the wall? Maybe you supported that politician that lost the last election?
Could you have a Falun Gong book on your shelf, or a poster with Tiananmen Square's "tank man"? Maybe an image mocking a country's leader as a cartoon character?
What if SpyCam2 sees/hears something "islamophobic"? This is merely illegal in some countries, but a ticket to a death penalty in others. What then? Should the authorities be notified? Will Facebook turn over recordings if asked or demanded by a court or pre-emptively send them?
All reasonable questions in my mind.
Let's go just a bit further. Are you prepared to adjust your surroundings and life to be completely PC, a sterile pokerface world devoid of any Anti-whatever-that-isn't-politically-correct items which might offend? That's the world that the East Germans suffered under, while the Stazi collected every available fact, trying to ferret out "traitors" among the populace. at least they were safe in their own homes, for the most part (although some important conversations took place in the rest room, with the water running, to hide from microphones).
So should you fail to hide your unpopular thinking, at the least you'll face a 30-day ban from the hardware+software you paid for. If you're not so lucky, they might just have to call the authorities, or the religious police, you know, "for your protection."
Now add monitoring/recording/cataloging of your speech... are you comfortable knowing everything you've said is TOS-approved? Will it remain so, forever? doubtful.
Think this is absurd? It's not. Oculus just became part of Facebook's platform. Try any of the behaviours above on facebook and see what happens. (hint: enjoy your ban)
That's not entertainment. That's Dystopia: Big Brother invited into your home, re-imagined as a face-hugger with cloth straps.
I know I wouldn't. I have stayed off FB -- active avoidance -- for a reason. Now that they have taken over the Oculus (I was an early Rift developer, and have the production Rift now) my journey with them is complete.
I don't trust Facebook and at this point I simply cannot imagine any possible action they could take to restore that trust.
It's a real disappointment. I admire the product and appreciate the contributions of the engineering team to advancing the state-of-the-art.
Well, I have a legacy Oculus account, and the Quest 2 will be obsolete before the grandfathering time has expired, so I am going to get the Quest 2. Hopefully a reasonable competitor will be available by then.
I bought the original Quest and will stop using it when the Facebook account becomes mandatory. Hopefully there is a suitable replacement from a less odious company at that time. I absolutely will not get a Quest 2 despite being very impressed by both the hardware update and price.
I wouldn't use it even if it was free. I don't want the market to grow in the direction FB is trying to take it. I don't want to subsidize it with my privacy.
I wonder if that might be a useful next step for FOV in VR... Some additional screen area in the peripheral that's lower res than the main screen area?
This seems like an obvious and fairly low cost solution (in terms of both money and CPU). I wonder why this wasn't integrated into commercial headsets yet?
I have a Valve Index and love it. Yes it's immersive regardless, but VR still has such a long way to go on the quality front. FOV is fairly poor, pixel density is awful.
I'm looking forward to an actual "retina display"-like option (60+ PPD) with higher FOV in another 5-10 years, but I'd assume that'll be 8K minimum per eye, maybe more like 10-12K.
I'm not the person you're asking but I've tried it and it goes both ways for me. Sometimes it's still very immersive, and other times the reduced FOV (compared to reality) does take away from the experience.
Psychologically, yes one does forget about the real world. But in terms of actual FOV measurements the human eye is far better.
However having that narrower FOV in VR is actually a good thing, as it makes for a smaller arc subtend for each pixel. If you were to give the wearer a 60 degree FOV in VR, they'd see very crisp and detailed things. But the more you stretch it out, the worse the effective visual quality becomes.
I'm just waiting for tech that uses eye-tracking to put a tiny hi-DPI display that "moves around" so it stays right in line with your foveal vision, while having a static, head-wrapping low-DPI display behind it, to cover your peripheral vision.
I can't imagine there's any tech that'd let an actual LCD move around at the speed your eyes do. But maybe the foveal display could be from ultra-low-power short-throw laser DLP, bounced right into your eyeballs? It could even use the glass surface of the peripheral LCD display as a DSLR-alike mirror, so that it can reach your pupil from a straight-on angle.
I feel like such a hybrid device would have a number of obvious operational advantages, e.g. much lower bandwidth/render-power requirements (each frame, your GPU would only have to render a high-resolution image of a little square, along with a very low-res image of the rest of the scene.)
> I feel like such a hybrid device would have a number of obvious operational advantages, e.g. much lower bandwidth/render-power requirements (each frame, your GPU would only have to render a high-resolution image of a little square, along with a very low-res image of the rest of the scene.)
Foveated rendering provides these benefits without needing a mechanical mechanism. (Though it does still require full-field high resolution displays and apparently the eye-tracking requirements haven't been fully solved yet -- which would also preclude your suggestion of a hybrid device.)
> I'm just waiting for tech that uses eye-tracking to put a tiny hi-DPI display that "moves around" so it stays right in line with your foveal vision, while having a static, head-wrapping low-DPI display behind it, to cover your peripheral vision.
Isn't that what Varjo is doing? They do have headsets out, but they are strictly targeting enterprises at this point (cheapest headsets start at 5k + mandatory support for 800).
All the extra angles of FOV are very distorted, and there is a red static constantly fuzzing away in the display.
Plus, you have to deal with the Pimax company, which has to be one of the most incompetent companies I've ever met when it comes to taking money and delivering product without stepping into the realm of actual fraud. When I bought mine, it was 3 false "it's shipped" announcements, 2 months, and a threat to reverse my credit card charge before I finally received it.
Quest can't do VR titles. It will always be a niche mobile game market that can't give VR justice. If they would integrate h264 hardware decode and allowed the PC oculus software to stream to it, then we'd be in business.
Wireless VR is a big problem right now, it's expensive, doesn't work well, and for it's price you might as well get better hardware.
Oculus should ship quest with a cheap little 5Ghz USB broadcaster that you can put into your gaming PC and the oculus software can then stream through. Everyone wants to be able to have no cords and tuck their PC into a corner, not drag it with them.
Have you tried the Quest? I've owned many different VR headsets in the past, the Quest is pretty fantastic. "can't do VR titles" is such an exaggeration it doesn't make sense.
I develop avatars for the Quest in VRChat. The Quest is using very underwhelming hardware compared to PC, as it can only handle very strict standards, such as 10,000 Polygons to a character. While PC can handle significantly more.
As a quest user in vrchat you're significantly limited on your experience because your hardare cannot handle anything more than the bare minimum of avatars. We don't consider it a real VR experience.
This is of course very understandable if you know hardware benchmarks. VR is taxing on even the most expensive of PC hardware. Trying to put an Android phone in the same category as an RTX 2070 just isn't possible.
VR titles as in Skyrim VR, Half Life: Alyx, Counter Strike, basically anything that's a VR title for PC.
Agreed - VRChat is very limited in Quest. But that might be the fault of the app, not the platform. Rec Room works pretty well, basically the same experience on Quest and desktop.
Android phone hardware is nowhere close to rendering performance as modern desktop dedicated graphics cards. VR is fundamentally taxing on graphics rendering. Therefore, mobile devices do not and will not compare in performance.
> Wireless VR is a big problem right now, it's expensive, doesn't work well, and for it's price you might as well get better hardware.
There’s an app for the Quest called Virtual Desktop that allows streaming SteamVR over WiFi, which on a good network is almost indistinguishable from wired VR. Playing Half-Life: Alyx without being tethered to your computer is a pretty awesome experience.
Nope. I played Half-Life: Alyx with both cable and wireless for the first few hours, alternating, and ended up playing the rest of the game in full wireless, because I haven't noticed any difference.
And I am saying that as someone who is fairly sensitive to this kind of stuff, like, I can easily see the difference between 60hz and 144hz refresh rate on monitors, for example (yes, i am aware that refresh rate and input delay are different things, this was just an example).
Same, for "flat" gaming I can barely tolerate in-home streaming, and just for slow paced games. So I didn't have high expectations for VirtualDesktop but when I tried it the experience pretty much blew my mind... only playing wireless now.
No, I mean "almost indistinguishable" on a good network. I did use it once on a network where the Quest would occasionally drop down from a 5Ghz connection to a 2.4Ghz connection, and in that case you could definitely tell by the additional latency.
There is, but I would assume it's having to use software decode, which is battery draining, and you have to have good wifi. This is a solved problem, the Steam Link had been doing H264 hardware decode to do streaming across networks. But you need that hardware support to make it polished and well useable. Android phones currently have chips for hardware H264, so they really could do this as an official features if they wanted to, it's just very dissapointing that they don't.
I've probably had a dozen people with glasses use my headset. None of them seemed to have any issues with visual quality, though a couple had issues with comfort. The Quest comes with a spacer for glasses. That works fine 90% of the time, but some people's glasses are too big and can hit the lenses in the headset. This can be uncomfortable and (more importantly) it can scratch the lenses in the headset.
If you have glasses, I'd recommend getting some lens protectors for the headset. They're usually around $10 and take a minute to apply.
They work okay, but I recommend looking on Etsy and finding some magnetic lens adapters for about $25 dollars. They click into the headset and then you take the lenses out of of a specific $10 pair of Zenni Optical lenses and stay attached to the headset itself.
Really sad that they are getting out of PC based VR. That said, my rift has been sitting in a corner for a year. I was really impressed from a technical perspective and felt the tech showed great promise. Good for HTC I guess.
> That said, my rift has been sitting in a corner for a year
Same. When "Half-Life: Alyx" was released, I started the motions of setting up my Oculus with the sensor towers, remembered how tedious it was, and promptly put it back. Sounds like the Quest 2 solves all of that.
I seriously doubt the Quest 2 will be able to run Alyx. My mid-range PC can't handle it on the Oculus (I think due to some heavy lifting Steam had to do to integrate with the Oculus)
Occulus Link allows tethering to a PC via a USB cable, and Virtual Desktop can do SteamVR over WiFi. When I first heard of Virtual Desktop I was dubious, but on a good quality network it’s ridiculously good.
Indeed, I was very sceptical that it would work on my ISP provided wifi-router but it worked flawlessly. Although I've only played Alyx where you probably have some subconscious latency tolerance.
It's so strange that they don't package wifi based oculus link as an out of the box feature.
It wouldn't surprise me to see it appear as a standard feature at some point, but it'll take a while for them to tune it to properly cope with all the awful wireless access points out there. Virtual Desktop can get away with occasionally having problems connecting to your computer, or latency introduced by being on a bad network, because its 3rd party software which requires a bit of technical knowledge just to be able to get it installed with SteamVR support. That filters out the people who aren't going to understand the concept of network latency somewhat, but having it as a standard feature would mean anyone with £300 to spend on a Quest is going to expect it to work perfectly everytime.
Alyx is a PCVR game, not an Oculus Quest standalone game. You aren't expected to be able to run it standalone, you are expected to run it the same way you would run it on any other VR headset - by connecting it to your PC using a cable (or using wireless solutions).
You are correct, the parent comment is just misinformed.
Oculus is indeed "getting out of PCVR" in a sense that they won't have a device that does only PCVR in the future, yeah. But both Quest and Quest 2 support PCVR functionality that works the exact same way Rift does, natively and very smoothly. With that in mind, it just doesn't make sense for Oculus to release a PCVR-only device, if their standalone-capable devices can support PCVR just as fine.
I'm really curious to see an engineering presentation on the Quest 2, how it utilizes the XR2 hardware, and what it adds on top. From my understanding, the XR2 is capable of doing all the tracking on its own. The previous gen of hardware was based on the 835, which did not have SLAM on-chip, and thus Oculus' tracking algorithms were the big value-add over the competition.
And originally, Oculus was behind the curve on hadware implementations. The Lenovo Mirage Solo was the first 6-DOF headset, a year prior to the Quest, also running the 835. The Vive Focus was in the middle of the two. So, if the XR2 is doing the heavy lifting, it would suggest a big roadblock for competitor devices has been lifted.
So how much of the Quest 2 is above and beyond the Qualcomm XR2 VR headset reference design minus Facebook's services integrations?
I wonder how the FB leadership team thinks about this whole FB/Oculus integration. It is clear that they think adding a "social" component to Oculus is going to help the Quest gain traction.
But the question is, why does that "social" component have to be Facebook? With all the negative baggage a FB account carries with it, maybe the easier option would've been to let Oculus build its own social model, à la Play Station Network-style?
I have a Quest and I can tell you that for me (and at least for people like me) the real value is in social games/experiences. I have a hard time going through a solo game (although I haven't tried Half Life Alyx yet) but social stuff are amazing! Everyone should try to play settlers of Catan in VR (it was only available on the Go unfortunately) which was insane!
At this point I just want more of my friends to get a Quest so that I can hang out with them in VR. I already communicate with these friends via facebook so for me it's natural that this would work out perfectly.
Optimistically? I think they're definitely betting on VR being "reality adjacent" eventually and hence social interactions might actually be more meaningful in VR than they are on a website.
Cynically, I think they just want even more datapoints on what everyone is doing. If people start to use VR the way they use the internet even a little (accessing content provided for free with ads), then data from a person's VR headset will have valuable information about how to target ads to that person.
I'm fine with them adding optional social stuff. People have different interests.
But why does it have to be mandatory? It doesn't make sense. They paint it as something to facilitate social, well yes, let people login with their FB account if they want to, but don't make it a requirement.
If Instagram and Whatsapp don't require a FB account to work there is zero reason Oculus would.
This artificial and completely unnecessary tying is very disappointing.
There is a trade off though in terms of detail. You're essentially taking a pixelated image and stretching it out more with just a FOV increase. The result for your eyes is essentially increasingly greater simulated myopia.
> But Facebook's policies make that "standalone VR" magic harder to recommend this time around. As we've previously reported, Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to function; without one, you cannot run the system's built-in fork of Android, nor can you toggle the system's "developer" mode and sideload VR-optimized Android apps of your choosing. (Speaking of: New rules coming to the Facebook VR developer portal will soon force anyone who wants to sideload apps to either supply a working phone number or a credit card. Yes, that is separate from the FB account requirement.)
> Quite frankly, I had designs on testing Oculus Quest 2 with a burner Facebook account. I'd set one up years ago with a spam email address, and Facebook's reps asked me for my Facebook account address before they shipped me the review unit. I gave them my burner profile URL, then went to reset the password. By wrongly typing my new password one time, I was locked out. "Please send us proof of your identity," the site sternly warned me.
This is just the start of a long long section of the article on how Facebook will, at the drop of a hat, ban you, remove access to all your purchased software, & how invisible moderators haunt all your VR spaces.
All-in on evil, cruddy, awful policies. An affront to general-purpose computing as the world had known & enjoyed it.
Yeah I appreciate the honest review from Ars here for sure. Really disappointed by the downgraded controller tracking. Superb tracking was one of the surprises of the first Quest.
Which means Facebook was wrong, since they claimed that.
Yet the controllers are still less accurate, as per Sam's testing, so his point still stands. It doesn't matter how many leds there are, only that they're worse controllers.
I don't know all the tradeoffs involved, but seems like a downgrade to go from the pure black of OLED to the backlight bleedthrough of LCD for a screen so close to the eyes.
Ghosting on completely black regions in Half Life Alyx was the only complaint I had with my OLED HMD. I tried an LCD one and my brain was better at ignoring the extra brightness than it was the ghosting.
The Quest has a resolution of 1440 × 1600 per eye. So the 50% more pixels works out to 20% more scan lines (1920) and 27% more pixels/line (1832). 90 Hz has potential perhaps via PC link.
Don't forget it's an RGB display with 3 subpixels per pixel. Quest 1 was 2 subpixels per pixel (pentile). You'll definitely see much more of an improvement than 27%.
Pentile is not bad when the pixels are so small you can't see them. Under a magnifying glass which a VR headset basically is, not so much.
I think where pentile went wrong was prioritizing green/red. I believe red has the lowest spatial resolution and should have prioritized green/blue instead. When using Night Shift I notice a definite subjective reduction in spatial resolution.
Most headset support SteamVR, either natively or through compatibility layers, but not sure about the other way around e.g. MSFS20 on Index. Pimax is SteamVR.
The biggest difference is that the Quest is a standalone VR platform (it includes hardware that can also run the games), whereas the majority of VR devices are just display devices (screens, lenses, audio, controllers).
I feel that wireless and better tracking are the biggest technical differences that favor the Quest 2. WMR, whether deserved or not, has a bad reputation for tracking. I don't know why Reverb didn't support a base station option since it was supposedly about "no compromises". Oculus would be superior for non-sim games and would be near equivalent in sim game performance when it's linked to a PC.
The facebook requirement is a hard sell for many people though. The lack of IPD adjustment may be a be killer for a lot of people, but I'm pretty sure that's one of the major things that brought down the price to $299
The Reverb G2 has additional tracking cameras on the side which should significantly expand the tracking envelope. I still want an external camera option though.
A benefit of the Quest is that you will have a wider range of apps. You can run all the apps that you can with Reverb G2, plus all the Oculus PC apps and the Oculus Quest apps.
> We’re going to focus on standalone VR headsets moving forward. We’ll no longer pursue PC-only hardware, with sales of Rift S ending in 2021. That said, the Rift Platform isn’t going anywhere.
Not necessarily. Since the Rift S launched and Oculus Link released, Facebook changed the branding of games that require a PC to "Supports Rift Platform" to signify that they can also be played on a tethered Quest. I expect they'll change the name in the future though
Yeah, but as someone who owned the Rift S and then bought a Quest - it turns out there's a rude surprise that all the games you bought for the Rift S have to be bought again for the Quest.
The Rift S was a huge mistake, ironically I only bought it because when I asked my friend working at Oculus which one to get he said to get the Rift S (I suspected then they didn't care about it).
> all the games you bought for the Rift S have to be bought again for the Quest.
Wrong on 2 accounts.
1. A lot of games support cross-buy between Rift and Quest versions.
2. For those that don't support cross-buy (or games that only have a Rift version), and you already own them for Rift, you can play them on Quest just fine by connecting it to your desktop either wirelessly (using software like VRDesktop) or using a cable. Just like you were previously able to with Rift (minus the wireless option, iirc it wasn't a thing for Rift).
Tl;dr: Quest is a superset of Rift's functionality. You can do everything with Quest that you could do with Rift. Officially supported, without any hacks or workarounds. If you had a game you purchased for Rift, you can play it on Quest just as if you were playing it on Rift without paying anything extra.
1 is not true for the games I had (which were the most popular ones including beat saber).
Saying “just use a cable” or crappy streaming software to play games on the quest when the entire point is to have a wireless device is lame.
Most people are going to assume if you buy something in the oculus store that you can play it on oculus devices (unless it’s an issue related to device performance which I can understand).
Your original complaint was that you have to rebuy games you already bought for Rift to be able to play them on Quest, which is not true. You can play them on Quest the exact same way you were able to on Rift.
Also, wireless solution isn't "crappy". I tried Half-Life: Alyx using both cable and wireless (VRDesktop) for an hour each, and ended up finishing the game using wireless, because it felt more comfortable, and I didn't notice any difference that I could actually spot.
> "You can play them on Quest the exact same way you were able to on Rift."
Yeah, but the entire point of buying the Quest is so I don't have to play them the exact way I was able to on the Rift.
For a comparison, what you're describing feels like this:
1. I buy a videogame on steam and play it on my computer.
2. I buy a new computer and download steam.
3. Steam tells me that I have to rebuy the game to play it on new computer.
4. Someone on HN says I can just connect my new computer to the old computer in order to play the game and that this is 'the exact same way'.
Do you see how that's a shitty experience?
It's ridiculous that the quest version of the game is a separate thing you have to buy even though it's the same store. Your solution relegates me to being attached to the PC defeating the entire point of the quest. If the game couldn't be played on the quest because it needed the PC's graphics that's one thing, but this isn't that - beatsaber exists and works fine on the quest.
>It's ridiculous that the quest version of the game is a separate thing you have to buy even though it's the same store.
Again, this isn't Oculus' fault in this case, but the dev's. It is dev's choice whether to offer their product as cross-buy or not.
And, in a lot of cases, it makes sense why they didn't do it. For example, if the differences between versions are so stark that they are almost different games, paying separately makes sense. For me, personally, about half of the games I own that exist on both Rift and Quest were purchased with cross-buy, so I didn't have to pay twice. And I like to support devs who do things in the interests of the consumer with my wallet.
I'd argue that it is Oculus' fault, they own the platform and could force the devs to do it if they want to be in the store.
Do you think Apple would put up with this kind of thing?
I buy a ton of software and I'm happy to support devs, but this isn't that.
Rebuying the same product from the same store to use on an iteration of the Oculus' VR hardware sucks. My guess is they looked and figured it didn't matter since there were so few Rift S owners.
Would you be okay with having to rebuy the same games every VR hardware release?
> "And, in a lot of cases, it makes sense why they didn't do it. For example, if the differences between versions are so stark that they are almost different games, paying separately makes sense."
> Update, 3:30 p.m. ET: Since this article went live, we've seen infrared camera footage from Tested confirming an identical number of LED bulbs in both generations of Quest controllers
>"....which puts Facebook's original statement into question. The FB rep may have been describing a downgrade in frequency or power for those LED bulbs in Quest 2 controllers."
> I went back to compare tricky "expert" Beat Saber levels on both Quest 1 and Quest 2, and sure enough, the older controller is noticeably more accurate. It's hard to perfectly measure VR controller detection without access to verbose data logs (which I've used to diagnose issues with SteamVR in the past). But I can safely say that after an hour going back and forth between Quest 1 and 2, the number of lost swipes on the newer hardware was higher.
Regardless of whether the new controllers have fewer IR emitters or not, the tracking performance seems to be subjectively worse.
The review really seems like a takedown piece, so I don’t trust it too much on subjective measures, especially when they are mixed in with factual errors.
- Reduce or re-distributed weight (neck/upper back ache remains an issue)
Instead, what we got in the Q2 is the same weight but a head-strap that's a substantial downgrade. That decision just compounds the Q1's most glaring weakness.
Then throw in the mandatory Facebook account, downgraded eye adjustments, side-grade screen, downgrade battery life, and a bunch of cost-cutting all over: You just killed Quest.
I've gone from recommending Quest to outright recommending against Quest. They should have taken some weight out of the headset and put it in a box that goes in your pocket, not kept the weight and made a bad head-strap even worse.
Even with the $50 headstrap "upgrade" it is still worse than the HTC Vive Deluxe Audio Strap which many Q1 owners including myself own (via 3D printed adapter).
Its good that Facebook is over-reaching. We are in too early for one headset to be the only player in town. This will give others a chance to move into the space, I think. Looking at you Nintendo :)
Considering the success of the Quest compared to most other headsets.... I'm wondering of Sony is going to try to make the next PlayStation VR a standalone device.
Sony is launching the PS5 in November this year, and there hasn't been any word on a new VR headset to go with it, but I imagine they're developing something new.
I disagree with almost everything you said. Firstly it's not the same weight; it's 10% lighter. If you want a better head strap then you can get the official upgraded one and combined it's still cheaper than Quest 1. Tested's review [1] says battery life is the same, plus there's now a battery strap you can buy to double it and balance the weight distribution. Tested also says the controller tracking is not worse, audio is better, and all things considered the screen is a significant improvement. Then of course there's the extra RAM and upgraded SoC.
The only serious downgrade here IMO is the IPD adjustment, but for the vast majority of people it's not an issue. In other ways it's a clear improvement. I won't be getting one as I have an Index, but this is going to sell more than any other headset. The tech and the price are both incredible.
Edit: Ah I see about the weight, you must have been talking about the weight combined with the upgraded headstrap, which does indeed make it heavier than Quest 1, by about 7%. I'll reserve judgement on comfort until I try it. Quest 1 wasn't exactly comfortable for me but it's about more than just the weight number.
The reduced cost and increased portability make it clearly the right choice for the product IMO. Cost and convenience are the #1 and #2 barriers keeping people out of VR. Once people see the value they can decide to spend on the headstrap for upgraded comfort.
They didn't increase portability from the Quest 1 though.
All they've done is forced the consumer to pick between portability but a bad user experience or no-portability, $50 cost, and a basically acceptable one.
At least the Quest 1's headstrap was basically passable, this isn't.
The cloth headstrap is absolutely more portable than Quest 1. The $50 upgrade cost is more than compensated by the $100 discount on the headset itself.
I’m fairly sure the Ars review is plain wrong on this as well. Measurements in other reviews show the Quest 2 at 503g, vs the Quest 1 at 580g. That is around a 14% weight improvement, not 10%. On top of that, the headset depth has been reduced by 1-2cm from pictures which will improve things substantially due to reduced moment.
I don’t agree that selling an improved headstrap is admitting “they messed up the headstrap”. They had to reduce costs to hit $300 to appeal to the mainstream casual market. I think it’s awesome they are finally offering a premium headstrap for those of us who want comfortable VR and are willing to pay a bit extra for it.
I'm pretty sure comfort is one of the top priority there, so I really doubt the comfort was not improved between two Quest versions, it makes no sense to me, better check other reviews.
> Firstly it's not the same weight; it's 10% lighter.
The Quest 2 itself is the same weight as the Quest 1. The "10%" you're quoting is entirely from the headstrap changes, if you put a Q1 headstrap on the Q2 they'd weight the same.
They made no improvements, and because of the downgraded headstrap it is actually in worse shape out of the box.
> If you want a better head strap then you can get the official upgraded one
And lose the 10% weight savings, and portability in a portable VR console.
> Tested also says the controller tracking is not worse
Wasn't a claim I made.
> all things considered the screen is a significant improvement
One screen instead of two, and downgrade from OLED to LED. If by "significant improvement" you mean cheaper and worse, but higher FPS then yes, otherwise no
If LCD is a downgrade from OLED then why did Valve Index at 3x the price choose LCD? The fact is it's simply better overall. The resolution, brightness, screen door reduction, full subpixel array, and uniformity matter more than the contrast. Really contrasty scenes are problematic anyway because of the fresnel lenses and OLED black smearing. 1 vs 2 screens is only a downgrade for IPD adjustment, which I agree is the one area that got significantly worse on Quest 2.
The Valve Index only went with LCD in order to use a new LCD tech that allowed high refresh rates and low persistence, it was a downgrade in all other ways except refresh rate. The Quest 2 and Quest 1 have the same refresh rate, so it's a side-grade at-best.
This is false, Quest 2 has 20% faster refresh rate than Quest 1 (in hardware, software support is coming after launch). You don't know if persistence was improved or not (my guess is it was). As I mentioned, OLED contrast is limited in VR due to the fresnel lenses and black smear correction, and my comment lists several other areas that are upgrades over OLED that you just ignored.
Valve made the wrong decision. I bought an Index in August, sold it 2 days later. One reason was how washed out the LCD looked compared to the Rift (non-S). Another reason is the controllers are not porn friendly as they require 2 hands to put on. Hoping the HP coming soon will be a better upgrade.
Talk about a misleading quote. The full text here is this.
Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to function; without one, you cannot run the system's built-in fork of Android, nor can you toggle the system's "developer" mode and sideload VR-optimized Android apps of your choosing.
That's also leaving out information. The full-full text here is this:
"But Facebook's policies make that "standalone VR" magic harder to recommend this time around. As we've previously reported, Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to function; without one, you cannot run the system's built-in fork of Android, nor can you toggle the system's "developer" mode and sideload VR-optimized Android apps of your choosing. (Speaking of: New rules coming to the Facebook VR developer portal will soon force anyone who wants to sideload apps to either supply a working phone number or a credit card. Yes, that is separate from the FB account requirement.)"
There is something odd about this Ars review. It’s not the normal high quality review I expect from them. There is a lot of subjectivity and plain wrong things stated (like less IR sensors in the controller). The only legit criticisms I picked up are the IPD adjustment and the FB requirement.
Agreed. Their reviews are usually to the point, objective statements with tasteful opinions. This article was unlike others and his opinions were in the way of actually hearing about how it was. I am not even in the market for one yet I do not feel informed after that review.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 418 ms ] threadAnd you’ll soon HAVE to use your FB account with it.
Interesting they’ve killed the Rift S. So they’re all in on the Quest.
Seems like this is also the end of the road for Rift, the Quest 2 is lower cost, more pixels, and they mentioned 90 hz screens for PCVR games over Link.
EDIT - review units went out in advance, so 3rd party reviews are already up. Here's one from Tested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x6lux6f_6g
You could think of Oculus as an effort to increase the amount of user attention inventory Facebook has in supply to rent out to advertisers. Also, they are positioning themselves as an intermediary for transactions in the future VR economy by being platform owner (a la Apple owning the App Store). My guess is the long-term plan is to make money here by displaying ads in VR and by getting a cut of goods and services sold though VR (see: Ready Player One).
They spent like 15 minutes of the presentation talking about how ethical they're going to be (re: AR glasses) and how trust has to be earned, but their ethics track record isn't exactly stellar.
You mean being part of the many billion dollar game industry by controlling the highest growth sector in that industry with vendor lock in and rent seeking for any game sold in that new market?
Yeah...who would want that...
I don't _think_ Facebook had a lot of computer vision expertise at the time and it makes sense they'd want to buy into that.
Amazon was a choice I guess?
Google (with Lenovo and the Mirage Solo) and Microsoft (with Hololens) had stand alone headsets before the Quest.
Again, why would FB want be the company that does that?
I kind of doubt we have anything to worry about now, but there is a terrifying future on the horizon where everything you look at, everything you do, is measured and any value is extracted and sent to ~~our new overlords~~ FB.
AR will be all about the ads as facebook can serve them everywhere you go. That's where they will make $100BN in ad revenue.
They are currently piggybacking on top of either android or ios. Which means they are at the whim of other powers.
With a platform they are much more in control, and able to tap into a much bigger revenue stream.
within FB people 'assume good intention'.
outside FB not so much.
think about why
Facebook might just be trying to get ahead of the game, betting that the next step past phones is VR/AR.
First it measures your fitness level. Those devices have high quality acceleration and gyroscope sensors. They could know your visual and acoustic acuity.
They measure what games you play, for how long, at what time.
With these data and processing done by AI created by engineers they can extract and know more about yourself than you do.
We know from Snowden that places like the NSA collect and save data expecting technological changes in 5-10 years in the future for processing that data. The technology for processing does not need to be ready yet.
This is extremely useful for Advertisers and secret services. This is not what you say you are, this is what you are.
Facebook generated $29 per user in the US last year. A small bit of extra info about people's gaming habits is not going to improve ad targetting enough to make up for a $100 gap in price.
But it's clear from the reviews the $100 was mainly achieved by cost-cutting.
They may still lose some money on it but that's just an investment in becoming market leader in VR.
"raw" VR data is about 10 megabytes a second of black and white infrared video.
plus audio and position data of either controllers or hands.
After its been processed it can give you a sparse pointcloud of your living room (which is not overly bad) but thats not something thats done by facebook, yet. With a bit more work you could get a dense pointcloud.
Unlike AR which will need a bunch more processing on device to get position and geo data, VR is mostly just slam
They get the ability to target ads against people who match some characteristics. Facebook's business is literally built on advertisers inability to access that data. If they had access, advertisers would advertise elsewhere and Facebook wouldn't get a cut.
So while protection of privacy is always also the right of one individual, I think it is crucial to realize that this kind of power over "the masses" isn't something any free society could afford in the long term on a systemic level. If we look at a democracy with it's separation of powers, it's institutions etc as a delicately balanced electronic circuit — which has the ability to self correct — players like Facebook are like the introduction of new feedback paths that work better for people who don't mind to sell their soul when abusing them. Of course such new connections will have an effect on the whole system, but the crucial point is, that nobody really considered what this effect might be and whether what we have and like in democracy can actually survive this.
You cannot have free elections if the people voting in it are put into their own matrix-esque simulation of reality. How could we ever find agreeable consent if our realities have no common overlap by design?
I think a lot of people in tech sphere don't really want to see this as they are profiting from this. It makes us powerful wizards who see more and understand more than others.
Here's the media championing it:
"How a dream team of engineers from Facebook, Twitter, and Google built the software that drove Barack Obama's reelection"
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/11/when-...
"How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2012/12/19/114510/how-obama...
"Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election"
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/17/obama-digital-...
"the firm never tried to stop them when they realized what was doing, and even told them they'd made a special exception for them"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5520303/Obama-campa...
"Why are politicians now freaking out about a feature that has been publicly documented since its inception and that was discontinued three years ago?"
https://reason.com/2018/03/23/cambridge-analytics-dust-up-re...
https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/is-zyngas-depend...
Not spreading the boogeyman of 'they sell your data' will improve discourse on how to actually change things.
C'mon, I get the hate but this is worst than tinfoil hat conspiracies.
Most of my games are bought on Steam, not on the Oculus store.
I worked on VR over 30 years ago. I am so happy to finally see great consumer VR gear.
all the games we've bought produce accurate and targeted profile that allow facebook to recommend new games with a high degree of accuracy.
https://www.oculus.com/blog/play-rift-content-on-quest-with-...
>We’re going to focus on standalone VR headsets moving forward. We’ll no longer pursue PC-only hardware, with sales of Rift S ending in 2021. That said, the Rift Platform isn’t going anywhere. In fact, we've seen significant growth in PC VR via Oculus Link, and the Rift Platform will continue to grow while offering high-end PC VR experiences.
So, yeah. End of the road for the Rift. Oculus Link makes it redundant.
But you can plug the Quest into a PC and use it as a PCVR headset. Oculus sells a 16 ft fiber optic cable for $80, but it works well over any good quality USB 3 cable (and even works over USB 2 now).
The downside of this is that it's more front heavy than a PC headset without all the standalone guts, and I'm sure there's non-zero latency for running the video stream over a USB connection rather than a standard video cable. It works pretty well though, I think the trade-offs are absolutely worth the benefits of having a standalone headset.
The version on the Oculus Store doesn't do SteamVR streaming though, you have to buy it and then sideload an alternate version (which still checks for a license from the store).
There's supposed to be some sort of easier sideloading system coming (currently you need to sign up for a developer account and enable developer mode), but no new info since that was announced a few months ago.
https://github.com/JackD83/ALVR
Pixel density isn't as high as what you'll get on a real monitor, but having lots of them ought to help make up for it.
Carmack brought this up in his talk last night, apparently with the higher pixel count in the Quest 2 the quality is now limited by the fresnel lens optics, and they won't be able to just keep bumping the pixel count up to improve visuals. So it's not clear what the path is to higher quality VR is for them. People have made headsets with more exotic multi-element glass optical setups, but there are trade-offs for cost, weight, and likelihood of things breaking if you knock it off a table.
So now you're tethered, your tether is more fragile, and you have significant extra latency.
Standalone headsets are so much more convenient, and are affordable to people without a high powered gaming computer, so I see why Facebook is going in this direction.
Also, there is a good amount of compression involved so the graphical fidelity takes a massive hit.
They claim that they are going to be improving both of these issues, but given that they still exist in largely the same state as they did with the Oculus Link Beta with the V1 Quest, people should be skeptical about how much improvement they are going to be able to accomplish. Carmack talked about some ideas on how it can be made better, but I don't know if he's still assisting them with anything at all.
I'm very happy with my v1 Quest, but its PC support has some significant drawbacks.
He also mentioned he hopes they can eventually get an official wireless solution out to the public.
It’s clearly dead and as someone who owned one it’s been clear FB hasn’t cared about it for some time.
Tethering just feels like an bootstrapping niche. Appealing to those who already find gaming PCs appealing, obviously dovetailing with highly engaged gamers. But, tethering is never going to "win." Tethering for power makes current battery life OK, even the quest 1 is good enough.
Mass adoption, almost certainly, means an affordable all-in-one unit. We have enough history at this point (with home gaming) to know what the price range is. Oculus have been playing within that range.
Graphics/power is already (Quest1) good enough for a lot of games. An interesting part of the history of home gaming is that both "more is never enough" and "good enough is good enough" seem to be true. Lots of the most popular gaming products (games, consoles.. eg minecraft) did not push boundaries at all. OTOH, bleeding edge has always been highly relevant, especially for blockbuster games.
On balance, I don't think graphics is a (commercially) limiting factor for VR anymore. This makes a rift/tethered device kind of questionable. If it doesn't get mass adoption, and I don't think it can), it can't support the high end games that really need these graphics. The oculus product line strategy (whether accidentally or deliberately) seems clever. The rift is what you develop new games for. They will (hopefully) be portable to the next gen Quest.
Overall, I think the current game is all about weight/comfort and content. The current devices are heavy & sweaty. This one weighs just 10% less. Every gram counts, but I don't think this is a breakthrough. Content is the other factor. IMO, exercise apps still need to breakthrough. I'm surprised ankle controllers and heart rate monitors aren't a thing yet. I really think the right game & controllers with the current gen quest could become a breakthrough workout thing. A lot of current games are pretty physical, but I suspect you can get to a point where a 6 week game addiction makes you look visibly fitter... on par with a daily gym routine.
But I do agree that it seems like a killer value - I'll probably preorder one!
There's multi-frame latency and compression artifacts involved in this. It's really disingenuous to say that a Quest 2 is unambiguously better than an actual PC VR headset
Will probably end up selling mine and getting another brand.
For PC-based training sims, we'll probably get the HTC Vive. And the Pico for the quest equivalent.
I haven't seen anything about this. Only battery news I've seen is they have a new strap system with a battery pack in it.
Do you have any experience with the Pico? It'd be great to have a non-creepy (and hopefully a bit more open) alternative to the Quest.
A) An algorithm flags your newly-created account as "inauthentic" and now you have to submit a copy of your driver's license to Facebook just to use a piece of consumer electronics you bought.
B) A different algorithm puts the pieces together and deduces that your burner account is the same identity as the real Facebook account you stopped using years ago or perhaps even "deleted." Nothing escapes the big-data inferences of The Graph.
Maybe I'm slipping through their net because my accounts are old?
I refuse to financially support a company that is doing so much to hurt democracy worldwide.
Facebook is doing the boring work that people don't like to talk about in tech forums, and that's why they're able to make a compelling consumer product.
The only other VR company that seems to get this is Sony, and they're married to a 6-8 year product cycle.
I advise a few companies doing enterprise VR and they are all OEM'ing the HP Reverb at half your list price with 4K per eye and high quality 6DoF.
Are you going to try to integrate SteamVR, cut the price by a thousand dollars and try to sell a privacy conscious headset?
So, when do you plan to "cut the price by a thousand dollars"?
Feels like a rude rhetorical question, but the answer is presumably at some point where their volume gets anywhere near HTC or Oculus, if that ever occurs.
It's depressing though how far apart the price point is from what Facebook can pitch it at. I am interested in use cases that would fit out an entire team with headsets but it's a non-starter at $1k+ and completely viable at $300 per headset. Made worse, sadly, by COVID where sharing equipment b/w team members is now pretty unlikely to be viable so we really need 2x the hardware.
what makes you think that facebook hurts democracy? Weren't democracy hurt way before facebook due to TV, radio, newspaper, and whatever was the communication mean of the day? I think a lot of people are over reacting here. If anything, FB helps against wannabe dictators, see how critical everybody is of Trump? Without social networks I think it'll have been much easier for Trump to make the US a dictatorship.
If the only way to avoid Facebook is to not play, I'm not playing. It's just that simple.
They'll also know what gets your attention, what doesn't… unless you can control your saccades, that'll leak a lot of information about your mind-state while viewing Facebook-controlled media. They could, if they wanted to, blackbox reverse-engineer bits of you via controlled-input attacks.
VR headsets are basically the most creepy thing they could be tracking my behaviour with – perhaps second to the smartphone, since at least I can take off the VR headset.
And as soon it does I stop using it.
As for reverse engineering my preferences I'm not sure I care honestly - if it means ads I get are more relevant it might even be a good thing.
I don't know I just don't feel there's a lot of value in profiling me specifically and it probably only helps them in aggregate anyway.
I'm not against dats privacy, but if it gets me superior hardware at a better price point I don't see the downside.
I'm much more bothered by wall garden platform like Apple imposing Apple tax and will slowly roll off Apple devices.
Nah; only a few dollars a (time period), really.
Multiply that by all their customers and you have a lot of money coming in from the creepy tracking.
They've shown to be bad actors in the past with harvesting as much data as possible, even on people who don't have accounts.
Is that a completely legal firearm/sword in the background? Is that a MAGA hat on the desk? Care to explain that Antifa flag on the wall? Maybe you supported that politician that lost the last election?
Could you have a Falun Gong book on your shelf, or a poster with Tiananmen Square's "tank man"? Maybe an image mocking a country's leader as a cartoon character?
What if SpyCam2 sees/hears something "islamophobic"? This is merely illegal in some countries, but a ticket to a death penalty in others. What then? Should the authorities be notified? Will Facebook turn over recordings if asked or demanded by a court or pre-emptively send them?
All reasonable questions in my mind.
Let's go just a bit further. Are you prepared to adjust your surroundings and life to be completely PC, a sterile pokerface world devoid of any Anti-whatever-that-isn't-politically-correct items which might offend? That's the world that the East Germans suffered under, while the Stazi collected every available fact, trying to ferret out "traitors" among the populace. at least they were safe in their own homes, for the most part (although some important conversations took place in the rest room, with the water running, to hide from microphones).
So should you fail to hide your unpopular thinking, at the least you'll face a 30-day ban from the hardware+software you paid for. If you're not so lucky, they might just have to call the authorities, or the religious police, you know, "for your protection."
Now add monitoring/recording/cataloging of your speech... are you comfortable knowing everything you've said is TOS-approved? Will it remain so, forever? doubtful.
Think this is absurd? It's not. Oculus just became part of Facebook's platform. Try any of the behaviours above on facebook and see what happens. (hint: enjoy your ban)
That's not entertainment. That's Dystopia: Big Brother invited into your home, re-imagined as a face-hugger with cloth straps.
I don't trust Facebook and at this point I simply cannot imagine any possible action they could take to restore that trust.
It's a real disappointment. I admire the product and appreciate the contributions of the engineering team to advancing the state-of-the-art.
EDIT: never mind. I won't be getting the Quest 2.
"All future unreleased Oculus devices will require a Facebook account, even if you already have an Oculus account."
https://www.oculus.com/blog/a-single-way-to-log-into-oculus-...
I hope Valve can produce a competitor. Index is doing just fine but the target markets are different.
They say virtual reality, but they sell virtual binoculars...
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/05/how-side-mounted-leds...
I'm looking forward to an actual "retina display"-like option (60+ PPD) with higher FOV in another 5-10 years, but I'd assume that'll be 8K minimum per eye, maybe more like 10-12K.
https://varjo.com/products/vr-2-pro/
However having that narrower FOV in VR is actually a good thing, as it makes for a smaller arc subtend for each pixel. If you were to give the wearer a 60 degree FOV in VR, they'd see very crisp and detailed things. But the more you stretch it out, the worse the effective visual quality becomes.
I can't imagine there's any tech that'd let an actual LCD move around at the speed your eyes do. But maybe the foveal display could be from ultra-low-power short-throw laser DLP, bounced right into your eyeballs? It could even use the glass surface of the peripheral LCD display as a DSLR-alike mirror, so that it can reach your pupil from a straight-on angle.
What I'm describing does seem to exist (a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_retinal_display) — but it doesn't seem that anybody has tried combining them with traditional LCD tech yet.
I feel like such a hybrid device would have a number of obvious operational advantages, e.g. much lower bandwidth/render-power requirements (each frame, your GPU would only have to render a high-resolution image of a little square, along with a very low-res image of the rest of the scene.)
Foveated rendering provides these benefits without needing a mechanical mechanism. (Though it does still require full-field high resolution displays and apparently the eye-tracking requirements haven't been fully solved yet -- which would also preclude your suggestion of a hybrid device.)
Isn't that what Varjo is doing? They do have headsets out, but they are strictly targeting enterprises at this point (cheapest headsets start at 5k + mandatory support for 800).
[edit] actually no, I remember them discussing that approach, but apparently they went with some kind of semi-transparent mirror to combine the images. https://varjo.com/blog/introducing-bionic-display-how-varjo-... & https://gfycat.com/perkywastefulhorsechestnutleafminer
Plus, you have to deal with the Pimax company, which has to be one of the most incompetent companies I've ever met when it comes to taking money and delivering product without stepping into the realm of actual fraud. When I bought mine, it was 3 false "it's shipped" announcements, 2 months, and a threat to reverse my credit card charge before I finally received it.
Wireless VR is a big problem right now, it's expensive, doesn't work well, and for it's price you might as well get better hardware.
Oculus should ship quest with a cheap little 5Ghz USB broadcaster that you can put into your gaming PC and the oculus software can then stream through. Everyone wants to be able to have no cords and tuck their PC into a corner, not drag it with them.
As a quest user in vrchat you're significantly limited on your experience because your hardare cannot handle anything more than the bare minimum of avatars. We don't consider it a real VR experience.
This is of course very understandable if you know hardware benchmarks. VR is taxing on even the most expensive of PC hardware. Trying to put an Android phone in the same category as an RTX 2070 just isn't possible.
VR titles as in Skyrim VR, Half Life: Alyx, Counter Strike, basically anything that's a VR title for PC.
It's the platform, not vrchat.
You can do this with the Oculus Link cable. It makes the Quest essentially into a Rift.
There’s an app for the Quest called Virtual Desktop that allows streaming SteamVR over WiFi, which on a good network is almost indistinguishable from wired VR. Playing Half-Life: Alyx without being tethered to your computer is a pretty awesome experience.
And I am saying that as someone who is fairly sensitive to this kind of stuff, like, I can easily see the difference between 60hz and 144hz refresh rate on monitors, for example (yes, i am aware that refresh rate and input delay are different things, this was just an example).
If you have glasses, I'd recommend getting some lens protectors for the headset. They're usually around $10 and take a minute to apply.
There is a special retainer that keeps the headest a bit farther away from your head.
Of course, that's not for the model being shown here, I'm not sure if it's still an option.
Same. When "Half-Life: Alyx" was released, I started the motions of setting up my Oculus with the sensor towers, remembered how tedious it was, and promptly put it back. Sounds like the Quest 2 solves all of that.
It's so strange that they don't package wifi based oculus link as an out of the box feature.
G2 next for me I think.
Oculus is indeed "getting out of PCVR" in a sense that they won't have a device that does only PCVR in the future, yeah. But both Quest and Quest 2 support PCVR functionality that works the exact same way Rift does, natively and very smoothly. With that in mind, it just doesn't make sense for Oculus to release a PCVR-only device, if their standalone-capable devices can support PCVR just as fine.
And originally, Oculus was behind the curve on hadware implementations. The Lenovo Mirage Solo was the first 6-DOF headset, a year prior to the Quest, also running the 835. The Vive Focus was in the middle of the two. So, if the XR2 is doing the heavy lifting, it would suggest a big roadblock for competitor devices has been lifted.
So how much of the Quest 2 is above and beyond the Qualcomm XR2 VR headset reference design minus Facebook's services integrations?
But the question is, why does that "social" component have to be Facebook? With all the negative baggage a FB account carries with it, maybe the easier option would've been to let Oculus build its own social model, à la Play Station Network-style?
At this point I just want more of my friends to get a Quest so that I can hang out with them in VR. I already communicate with these friends via facebook so for me it's natural that this would work out perfectly.
Cynically, I think they just want even more datapoints on what everyone is doing. If people start to use VR the way they use the internet even a little (accessing content provided for free with ads), then data from a person's VR headset will have valuable information about how to target ads to that person.
But why does it have to be mandatory? It doesn't make sense. They paint it as something to facilitate social, well yes, let people login with their FB account if they want to, but don't make it a requirement.
If Instagram and Whatsapp don't require a FB account to work there is zero reason Oculus would.
This artificial and completely unnecessary tying is very disappointing.
I have to admit, I would prefer more FoV instead of higher resolution.
The downgraded controllers and the awkward IPD adjustment system are the deal breakers for me.
From the review:
The takeaway: Bullet points for this review A better screen, both in pixel resolution and refresh rate.
90Hz, but when? Facebook isn't clear about higher frame rate support.
More powerful wireless-VR hardware, which powers nifty under-the-hood tricks.
Less battery life. You'll barely exceed two hours of gaming on a single charge.
A cheaper, flimsier headstrap. You can pay more for a nicer one.
A baffling change to the "IPD" slider. Only certain skulls need apply.
The controllers are the same... but worse. I'm a bit shocked by this one.
The F-word. Yeah, we'll get into that.
> But Facebook's policies make that "standalone VR" magic harder to recommend this time around. As we've previously reported, Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to function; without one, you cannot run the system's built-in fork of Android, nor can you toggle the system's "developer" mode and sideload VR-optimized Android apps of your choosing. (Speaking of: New rules coming to the Facebook VR developer portal will soon force anyone who wants to sideload apps to either supply a working phone number or a credit card. Yes, that is separate from the FB account requirement.)
> Quite frankly, I had designs on testing Oculus Quest 2 with a burner Facebook account. I'd set one up years ago with a spam email address, and Facebook's reps asked me for my Facebook account address before they shipped me the review unit. I gave them my burner profile URL, then went to reset the password. By wrongly typing my new password one time, I was locked out. "Please send us proof of your identity," the site sternly warned me.
This is just the start of a long long section of the article on how Facebook will, at the drop of a hat, ban you, remove access to all your purchased software, & how invisible moderators haunt all your VR spaces.
All-in on evil, cruddy, awful policies. An affront to general-purpose computing as the world had known & enjoyed it.
This is not true btw, their review is wrong on that
Yet the controllers are still less accurate, as per Sam's testing, so his point still stands. It doesn't matter how many leds there are, only that they're worse controllers.
Pentile is not bad when the pixels are so small you can't see them. Under a magnifying glass which a VR headset basically is, not so much.
I was eying the HP Reverb G2 for high resolution, and for its Microsoft Flight Simulator support.
EDIT: ah I just found this: https://www.reddit.com/r/HPReverb/comments/it5jvj/hp_reverb_...
Will all of these have access to the same software titles, or are they built on closed or incompatible software ecosystems?
e: TIL, WMR as platform do have support for SteamVR headsets https://store.steampowered.com/app/719950/Windows_Mixed_Real...
The facebook requirement is a hard sell for many people though. The lack of IPD adjustment may be a be killer for a lot of people, but I'm pretty sure that's one of the major things that brought down the price to $299
Well, actually it is isn't it?
The Rift S was a huge mistake, ironically I only bought it because when I asked my friend working at Oculus which one to get he said to get the Rift S (I suspected then they didn't care about it).
They should never have shipped it.
Wrong on 2 accounts.
1. A lot of games support cross-buy between Rift and Quest versions.
2. For those that don't support cross-buy (or games that only have a Rift version), and you already own them for Rift, you can play them on Quest just fine by connecting it to your desktop either wirelessly (using software like VRDesktop) or using a cable. Just like you were previously able to with Rift (minus the wireless option, iirc it wasn't a thing for Rift).
Tl;dr: Quest is a superset of Rift's functionality. You can do everything with Quest that you could do with Rift. Officially supported, without any hacks or workarounds. If you had a game you purchased for Rift, you can play it on Quest just as if you were playing it on Rift without paying anything extra.
Saying “just use a cable” or crappy streaming software to play games on the quest when the entire point is to have a wireless device is lame.
Most people are going to assume if you buy something in the oculus store that you can play it on oculus devices (unless it’s an issue related to device performance which I can understand).
Also, wireless solution isn't "crappy". I tried Half-Life: Alyx using both cable and wireless (VRDesktop) for an hour each, and ended up finishing the game using wireless, because it felt more comfortable, and I didn't notice any difference that I could actually spot.
Yeah, but the entire point of buying the Quest is so I don't have to play them the exact way I was able to on the Rift.
For a comparison, what you're describing feels like this:
1. I buy a videogame on steam and play it on my computer.
2. I buy a new computer and download steam.
3. Steam tells me that I have to rebuy the game to play it on new computer.
4. Someone on HN says I can just connect my new computer to the old computer in order to play the game and that this is 'the exact same way'.
Do you see how that's a shitty experience?
It's ridiculous that the quest version of the game is a separate thing you have to buy even though it's the same store. Your solution relegates me to being attached to the PC defeating the entire point of the quest. If the game couldn't be played on the quest because it needed the PC's graphics that's one thing, but this isn't that - beatsaber exists and works fine on the quest.
Again, this isn't Oculus' fault in this case, but the dev's. It is dev's choice whether to offer their product as cross-buy or not.
And, in a lot of cases, it makes sense why they didn't do it. For example, if the differences between versions are so stark that they are almost different games, paying separately makes sense. For me, personally, about half of the games I own that exist on both Rift and Quest were purchased with cross-buy, so I didn't have to pay twice. And I like to support devs who do things in the interests of the consumer with my wallet.
Do you think Apple would put up with this kind of thing?
I buy a ton of software and I'm happy to support devs, but this isn't that.
Rebuying the same product from the same store to use on an iteration of the Oculus' VR hardware sucks. My guess is they looked and figured it didn't matter since there were so few Rift S owners.
Would you be okay with having to rebuy the same games every VR hardware release?
> "And, in a lot of cases, it makes sense why they didn't do it. For example, if the differences between versions are so stark that they are almost different games, paying separately makes sense."
Sure, but that's not the case.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/09/review-we-do-not-reco...
> Update, 3:30 p.m. ET: Since this article went live, we've seen infrared camera footage from Tested confirming an identical number of LED bulbs in both generations of Quest controllers
>"....which puts Facebook's original statement into question. The FB rep may have been describing a downgrade in frequency or power for those LED bulbs in Quest 2 controllers."
> I went back to compare tricky "expert" Beat Saber levels on both Quest 1 and Quest 2, and sure enough, the older controller is noticeably more accurate. It's hard to perfectly measure VR controller detection without access to verbose data logs (which I've used to diagnose issues with SteamVR in the past). But I can safely say that after an hour going back and forth between Quest 1 and 2, the number of lost swipes on the newer hardware was higher.
Regardless of whether the new controllers have fewer IR emitters or not, the tracking performance seems to be subjectively worse.
- Reduce or re-distributed weight (neck/upper back ache remains an issue)
Instead, what we got in the Q2 is the same weight but a head-strap that's a substantial downgrade. That decision just compounds the Q1's most glaring weakness.
Then throw in the mandatory Facebook account, downgraded eye adjustments, side-grade screen, downgrade battery life, and a bunch of cost-cutting all over: You just killed Quest.
I've gone from recommending Quest to outright recommending against Quest. They should have taken some weight out of the headset and put it in a box that goes in your pocket, not kept the weight and made a bad head-strap even worse.
Even with the $50 headstrap "upgrade" it is still worse than the HTC Vive Deluxe Audio Strap which many Q1 owners including myself own (via 3D printed adapter).
But these days you can buy the adapter on etsy for under $5 ($20 full kit), which will keep your stuff from needing to get tape residue on it.
Sony is launching the PS5 in November this year, and there hasn't been any word on a new VR headset to go with it, but I imagine they're developing something new.
The only serious downgrade here IMO is the IPD adjustment, but for the vast majority of people it's not an issue. In other ways it's a clear improvement. I won't be getting one as I have an Index, but this is going to sell more than any other headset. The tech and the price are both incredible.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_x6lux6f_6g Tested's review is the one to trust. Norm knows his stuff.
Edit: Ah I see about the weight, you must have been talking about the weight combined with the upgraded headstrap, which does indeed make it heavier than Quest 1, by about 7%. I'll reserve judgement on comfort until I try it. Quest 1 wasn't exactly comfortable for me but it's about more than just the weight number.
I also think Facebook is kind of admitting they messed up the headstrap, if they have to sell a proper one separately.
All they've done is forced the consumer to pick between portability but a bad user experience or no-portability, $50 cost, and a basically acceptable one.
At least the Quest 1's headstrap was basically passable, this isn't.
I don’t agree that selling an improved headstrap is admitting “they messed up the headstrap”. They had to reduce costs to hit $300 to appeal to the mainstream casual market. I think it’s awesome they are finally offering a premium headstrap for those of us who want comfortable VR and are willing to pay a bit extra for it.
The Quest 2 itself is the same weight as the Quest 1. The "10%" you're quoting is entirely from the headstrap changes, if you put a Q1 headstrap on the Q2 they'd weight the same.
They made no improvements, and because of the downgraded headstrap it is actually in worse shape out of the box.
> If you want a better head strap then you can get the official upgraded one
And lose the 10% weight savings, and portability in a portable VR console.
> Tested also says the controller tracking is not worse
Wasn't a claim I made.
> all things considered the screen is a significant improvement
One screen instead of two, and downgrade from OLED to LED. If by "significant improvement" you mean cheaper and worse, but higher FPS then yes, otherwise no
Contrast matters a lot in VR, too.
What? It's still quite portable with an alternative strap. Somewhat bulkier for sure, but still easily small enough to put in a backpack.
That kills this product for me. If I can't mod BeatSaber it's useless.
Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to function; without one, you cannot run the system's built-in fork of Android, nor can you toggle the system's "developer" mode and sideload VR-optimized Android apps of your choosing.
"But Facebook's policies make that "standalone VR" magic harder to recommend this time around. As we've previously reported, Quest 2 requires a Facebook account to function; without one, you cannot run the system's built-in fork of Android, nor can you toggle the system's "developer" mode and sideload VR-optimized Android apps of your choosing. (Speaking of: New rules coming to the Facebook VR developer portal will soon force anyone who wants to sideload apps to either supply a working phone number or a credit card. Yes, that is separate from the FB account requirement.)"
https://www.theverge.com/21437674/oculus-quest-2-review-feat...