Facebook's F8 developer conferences tend to be chock-full of news, and that's truer than ever for 2019. The company's opening keynote brought major changes to just about every corner of Facebook's universe, including a site redesign, a super-li...Valve is stepping into the VR market with the high-end Index, and the company finally revealed the price and release date. The Index can be purchased individually or as part of a couple of bundles.
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Oculus announced that its Project Santa Cruz virtual reality headset will ship next year as the Oculus Quest, and we got to try out several new game titles on the Quest. Find out our impressions of VR without wires.
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Apex Construct is one of the games I expected to have some troubles fitting onto Oculus Quest. That’s largely because the game is impressive even on a PC VR platform. Here’s what we had to say about the game last year:
” From the moment you begin it’s clear that this is a ‘full’ VR game. You play as an unnamed protagonist summoned into the real world by an experimental AI named Fathr and pair up to defeat a rogue program named Mothr. Across six environments that are smartly reused over the campaign you explore the conflict between these two advanced beings as you journey through what remains of the facility in which they were created.”
A full single-player adventure with multiple levels, environments and action set pieces? Something has to give, right? Well, it does, but not quite as dramatically as you might expect.
Apex Construct is a great example of what developers can achieve when porting their PC VR games to Quest. It is, unmistakably, a visually inferior experience to all other versions of the game, but the core charm has been preserved incredibly well.
If you’re familiar with the original then some of the differences will be immediately obvious; textures are much more simplistic and have had little touches removed. The game’s first outside area, for example, swaps out details like dried up patches of grass for one-note color schemes. Rocks have lost the moss that once grew on their edges and flowing waterfalls look less convincing inside Quest.
Despite this, somehow the visuals retain their core appeal. The opening level’s sweeping vista impressed me just as much on Quest as it ever did on Rift or PSVR.
More importantly, the game remains a real thrill to play. Apex Construct’s visual downgrades serve to maintain the core experience and Fast Travel has absolutely pulled that off. In fact, the lack of wires on Quest more than made up for the visual gap between the two. I found it easier to spin around as enemies circled me and get more lost in Apex Construct’s chaotic brand of action than I ever have before. As I noted in my Oculus Quest review, I did notice a small handful of tracking hiccups, but nothing significant enough to frustrate or make me long for alternative tracking.
Still, many of the game’s original issues remain in this new version. The curtain often threatens to fall on Apex Construct’s post-apocalyptic world. Whether its events triggering when they’re not meant to, items disappearing under a fit of collisions or certain objects and even environments not loading properly, you’re never too far away from your next immersion-breaking bug. But Fast Travel has included all of the updates that have reached the game in the past year, including the Cygnia Cup survival mode it added for free. That’s more bang for your buck, especially if you consider this is a cross-buy game.
Apex Construct might have lost some of its visual sheen in the journey to Oculus Quest, but it’s all in service to the gameplay. In the heat of battle, dodging incoming projectiles and returning fire, I honestly wouldn’t be able to tell you if I was playing on Rift or Quest. That’s the goal that Facebook set itself with its new VR headset, and Apex Construct proves it’s within grasp.
Apex Construct will launch alongside Oculus Quest on May 21st. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Tagged with: Apex Construct, Oculus Quest
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Now that the Oculus Quest review embargo is up, the flood gates have basically been opened. The Quest is officially launching on May 21 and you can pre-order a headset for $399 starting today. You can read our full review of the device right now and take a look at the giant list of all 53 launch titles planned for day one as well, including all of the big ones you might have heard about already.
We don’t have access to the entire library just yet, but we do have access to a bunch of apps and we can talk about install sizes for those starting today. The Oculus Quest will be available in two variations, either 64GB (for $399) or 128GB (for $499) so taking file sizes into account is important.
To help out, we’ve made an alphabetical list of all the install sizes we know so far:
Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs – 230MB (full game)
Apex Construct – 1.3GB (full game)
Bait! – 222MB (full game)
Ballista! – 1.9GB (full game)
Beat Saber – 326MB (early access version, full version not available yet)
Creed: Rise to Glory – 954MB (full game)
Dance Central VR – 2.6GB (early access version, seems to be full game)
Dead and Buried II – 773MB (demo version, full version not available yet)
Face Your Fears 2 – 2.2GB (full game)
FOX Now – 7MB (video streaming app)
I Expect You To Die – 728MB (full game)
Journey of the Gods – 970MB (full game)
Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes – 124MB (full game)
Oculus Gallery – 138MB (media playing app)
Oculus TV – 71MB (video streaming app)
Oculus Video – 141MB (video streaming app)
Neverthink – 48MB (video streaming app)
Superhot VR – 1.8GB (demo version, full version not available yet)
Racket Fury: Table Tennis – 1.2GB (full game)
Red Bull TV – 14MB (video streaming app)
Rush – 767MB (full game)
Space Pirate Trainer – 1.4GB (full game)
Sports Scramble – 1.1GB (early access version, seems to be full game)
Thumper – 381MB (full game)
Ultrawings – 1.1GB (full game)
Virtual Virtual Reality – 515MB (full game)
Wander – 258MB (video and image streaming app)
Let us know your thoughts down in the comments below!
Tagged with: Oculus Quest
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Oculus Touch’s new revision is born more out of necessity than opportunity. 2019 sees Facebook’s VR hardware make the jump from outside-in positional tracking, which uses external sensors, to an inside-out system that instead has sensors mounted on the device. You can see the tech employed in the new Oculus Rift S and Oculus Quest headsets.
As such, Oculus Touch is in need of a bit of a refresh. The original Touch had a tracking ring that looped under your hand, but Rift S and Quest’s sensors wouldn’t be able to spot that. Instead, the loop now runs over the top of the controller. You might think it’s a minor change, but it does impact the overall ergonomics of the controller, and not necessarily for the better.
To be clear, this new Touch is still an amazing piece of technology. It offers all the same buttons and features as the original version. Each has two face buttons, a clickable analog stick and grip and trigger buttons. The right controller also sports an Oculus button whereas the left swaps it with a menu button. Finally, the same basic ‘finger tracking’ function, which detects which buttons you’re touching (if any), is still present. These features have helped make Touch the best VR controller since its launch in 2016, and they remain just as compelling here.
That is with exception of the Oculus button, which is now located closer to the face buttons. On the original, it would happily sit to the right side of your thumb when you pressed ‘A’ and ‘B’, but now it’s easier to accidentally press it with the base of your thumb. It won’t happen often but you will find yourself more aware of it which, in turn, occasionally distracts you from the virtual task at hand.
You can read our separate impressions on tracking the Touch controllers with either Rift S or Quest in their respective reviews. Broadly speaking, though Touch offers solid, precise VR tracking on both platforms, with the limitations of inside-out tracking holding it back in certain scenarios. It’s not a good idea to bring the controllers up close to the headset, for example, and you can easily occlude one tracking ring by holding the other over the top of it.
The build quality of the new Touch is largely as good as the old, except for a few things. The back of the controller now has a more textured grip. In fact, the entire device feels like it has just a touch more friction to it, which will hopefully save us all some smashed lights and TV screens in the years to come.
For the most part, the tracking ring is kept out of the way, but not entirely. If you do a thumbs up gesture (which many apps will simulate), you might find your thumb knocking against the top of the ring. In fact, you can reach any part of the ring with your thumb very easily. If, like me, you’re a bit of a fidget, you’ll miss the freedom the original’s bottom ring afforded you. The original Touch also had enough space to rest your thumb on the side when you weren’t pressing buttons, allowing for a more natural grasp. These new devices don’t enjoy that luxury.
It also makes the controllers feel ever so slightly off balance. They’re now just a touch top heavy, which will only be noticeable to those that spent extensive time with the original Touch. It’s not that it’s a problem so much as it was just a bit better the first time around.
I can’t speak to exactly how long the battery life lasts in the new Touch because, well, they haven’t run out yet. In fact, After around ten or so hours inside Quest, the Oculus Home screen still tells me there’s 90% battery life left in each. It is a shame, though, that Oculus decided to continue on with external AA batteries in this revision rather than adding a rechargeable solution. It undoubtedly helps keep cost down for Oculus but, in the long-term, stacks up the price for its customers. I’d have happily traded some of the controller’s lengthy battery life for such a solution.
Your impressions of the new Oculus Touch controllers will ultimately depend on how much time you spent with the originals. These are amazing controllers, capable of tracking your hands in VR to an incredibly precise degree. But, if it came down to preferences, we’d definitely favor the original model. The overall design is slightly less intuitive, with redistributed weight and a tracking ring that every so slightly restricts your freedom. The changes aren’t anywhere near damaging enough to deter from adopting either of Facebook’s new headsets, but we’ll certainly miss the days of the original Touch.
Tagged with: oculus touch
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There's a new challenger in the virtual reality scene, and it's the priciest option yet.
Valve, the company behind the online game retailer Steam, introduced the Valve Index on Tuesday. While it'll be available in multiple configurations, the full $999 bundle gets you the headset, a pair of Valve's Knuckles controllers, and two sensor-laden base stations.
If you're familiar with how the HTC Vive setup works, it's similar here. In fact, Valve's own store page notes that each individual piece of Index hardware plays nice with Vive and Vive Pro gear. Read more...
More about Entertainment, Gaming, Virtual Reality, Valve, and Valve Index
Oculus Quest, Facebook’s new standalone VR headset, is arriving in just a few weeks’ time. Facebook is pushing its latest device as an all-in-one VR system that will enable Rift-quality experiences. And it’s true that Quest’s inside-out tracking, for the most part, brings great PC VR titles to mobile. But to get there, developers have had to intensively optimize their games for less powerful hardware.
How did that pan out?
We’ve rounded up four Quest games that also appear on Oculus Rift and taken screenshots of each version. The left side of each picture below is Quest and the right is Rift. The differing hardware means that images are captured in different ratios, so we’ve done some cropping on Rift’s part.
Based on the demo supplied to us, Superhot VR is probably the best-looking port you can find on Quest right now. Granted the game’s minimalist art style was never the pinnacle of VR visuals, but the developer has done a remarkable job keeping them in line for Quest all the same.
You can notice a few slight differences, though. Namely in the below shot you can see additional lighting effects on Rift through the chainlink fence. Quest doesn’t enjoy such luxuries, but it doesn’t dent the experience one bit.
We’ve had extensive time with Apex Contrsuct on Quest and it holds up really well compared to PC. As you can see from these comparison videos, though, there’s an undeniable difference between the Rift and Quest versions.
Details like extra vegetation and overall texture quality are reduced in the Quest version. For the chance to play Apex Construct on Quest, though, the trade-off is more than worth it.
Performance-wise, Creed is one of the games we’ve seen that’s struggled most in translation to Quest. The tracking is a challenge and load times can be lengthy. Visually the game is much drabber too, though Survios has been smart with its optimizations.
Lots of character models still look detailed, for example. The Quest version also sheds a lot of lighting effects which, while atmospheric in the Rift version, help it compare a little better in screenshots.
Rush is an interesting one given that it’s designed to run the gamut of VR headsets. The Rift version was never particularly show-stopping visually, and the two compare a lot closer than you might expect.
In fact the Quest version seems to sport more vegetation in some places, which makes up for the blurrier textures. Draw distance is very low on Quest, but it was never huge on Rift to begin with.
So that’s just a handful of comparisons. We’ll likely share more as more games are added to Quest’s line-up in the run-up to launch on May 21st.
Tagged with: Apex Construct, Creed: Rise to Glory, Oculus Quest, oculus rift, RUSH, SUPERHOT VR
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Facebook F8 is finally here, and Facebook has taken the wraps off of a number of new products and services -- including a major Facebook redesign, a Messenger desktop app, and more. Here's everything Facebook announced at Facebook F8 2019.
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The Oculus Quest is, despite what your heart may desire, not a wireless Oculus Rift. The launch lineup is shaping up to include a lot of the Rift’s best titles, but many of them have been downgraded or adapted to fit onto the standalone Oculus Quest. Creed: Rise to Glory is a great example of some of the sacrifices developers may need to make in order to cram their high-fidelity VR games onto hardware designed around a mobile chipset.
For what it’s worth, Creed: Rise to Glory is still a feature-packed VR boxing game that puts you in the shoes of Adonis Creed, son of iconic Rocky movie franchise character, Apollo Creed. Between a decent tier-style campaign mode, lots of training exercises, simple freeplay setups, and a competitive PvP mode, there are lots of ways to get your sweat on with some virtual boxing fun.
Before we go much further, this is what we had to say about the original, Rift version of Creed: Rise to Glory, when it launched last year:
Creed: Rise to Glory is the best all-around boxing game VR has seen yet. While its serviceable campaign mode lacks the depth and variety that we’ve come to expect from Survios releases and some of the controls are a bit finicky, it more than makes up for it with a litany of training mini games and an addictive PvP mode. Trading blows, ducking shots, and scoring a powerful knockout against someone in immersive VR is about as close to an actual boxing match as you can find from the comfort of your own home.
Here is a GIF showing off my smooth moves against none other than Rocky Balboa. Please note that this is a highly-compressed GIF:
I won’t spend a ton of time talking about the game as a whole — you can read that original review for more details on that — but instead will focus on how this port differs from the original version. To be clear, this is the entire game. Survios managed to jam the whole experience onto the Oculus Quest with all of its game modes and fighters included. That alone is quite admirable. Unfortunately, the game suffers as a result.
For starters, the visual downgrade is a bit jarring. Textures are mostly flat with far less lighting to enhance things and fighters are just way less detailed when they get up in your face. The environments surrounding the rings feel empty and barren for the most part and it’s all around a major downgrade that’s noticeable if you’ve ever played the original. It’s honestly to the point that the art style just doesn’t flow right without the higher fidelity visuals.
Then when it comes to performance the Quest really struggles to keep up. Creed is a very fast game that requires quick reaction time, lightning fast reflexes, and the ability to move around and respond without hesitation. But that’s hard to do when the game chugs, drops frames, and has trouble keeping things flowing in the heat of a fight. Out of all the full games and demos I’ve tried on Quest so far, and that number is well over a dozen at this point, Creed may have the worst performance.
Thankfully it isn’t a consistent problem. It seems to warm up after a fight or two and smooth out some, oddly enough. Some fights didn’t have any performance issues, while others did. It was hard to figure out what exactly caused it and when it did happen it was noticeable enough to impact gameplay ever so slightly, but not so bad that it was unplayable. The core fun factor is still there, but it’s hampered a bit.
The biggest issue for me with Creed on Quest is how the tracking limitations of just four front-facing Insight cameras is never gonna be as good as a full roomscale setup for the original Rift, or even four Rift S with its five surrounding cameras. Most notably Quest had trouble keeping up when I wanted to block.
I don’t consider myself a great boxer by any means, but I’ve been to boxing gyms and have received instruction from actual boxing coaches and sparred with people that know what they’re doing. As a result, I can tell you with certainty that one of the first things you learn is to always keep your hands up and protect yourself. Well, that’s tough to do on Quest because if your hands are in front of your face and too close to the tracking cameras then the headset loses tracking and you’re a sitting duck to your opponent.
The workaround I figured out was to keep my hands a few inches in front of my face, sort of floating there, and the game interprets that as a good blocking position when in reality it feels like I’m trying to hug someone. Creed on Rift is exhilarating and realistic, but Creed on Quest feels like an exercise in trying to figure out how to avoid tracking issues.
Once you get used to retraining your brain in terms of how you play, Creed on Quest is still a ton of fun. The training mini games are still excellent, the music is great, and the huge cast of characters (including the Rocky Legends update) is fantastic. Playing as Apollo Creed and taking down Drogo as a rewriting of Rocky IV’s history left me very, very satisfied.
Creed: Rise to Glory seems to be one of the most brutally downgraded games in the entire Oculus Quest launch lineup so far. While far from being unplayable, everything from the visuals, performance, and gameplay quality suffer in the switch from a PC-powered Rift to a standalone device like Quest. The meat of it all is still good fun and if you love the pre-installed demo when you get your Quest you’ll probably love the full game, but this is definitely not the same experience as the original incarnation.
Creed: Rise to Glory launches for Oculus Quest on May 21 when the headset releases. The game will be a cross-buy supported title so if you own it on Oculus Home for Rift you’ll have it on Oculus Quest too. You can read our review of the Rift version here. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Tagged with: Creed: Rise to Glory, Oculus Quest
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Dance Central VR was one of the real stand out demos that I tried at GDC last month. When I walked into that hotel suite and put on an Oculus Quest headset to be treated to the latest VR music experience from Harmonix, I was certainly excited.
Now that I’ve had some extended time with the Oculus Quest and a much larger and expanded pre-release Early Access version of Dance Central to mess around with, I’ve got much more robust impressions of the dancing game. While I am reserving final judgement for when I’m granted “full” access to the game, these are my thoughts thus far.
This entire review was conducted using the Oculus Quest version of the game in various rooms and environments, all standing in roomscale arrangements.
Dance Central VR is designed to be played in short bursts, but you can easily sink a few hours into at a time if you really want to. There isn’t really much of a story or campaign mode from what I can see, but instead it’s about more subtle progression and immersion. As you explore different areas of the dance club and various surrounding buildings you’ll meet different NPCs that want to dance with you.
Each of the characters have their own unique personalities and voices that really do feel distinct and meeting each of them is part of the fun. As you dance with them more and more you’ll unlock new wardrobe options for yourself, different cell phone skins, and even dialogue choices for your text conversations. It seems silly, but when I had new texts from my favorite characters it genuinely made me a bit excited, sort of like getting a text from a friend in real life. Even if it was just a stupid selfie the fictional character took at the club.
Harmonix aren’t doing anything fancy from an AI perspective to make these characters really feel real by any means, but small things like that made a big difference for me. It made me actually want to log back in just to see what’s going on.
The actual dancing bits were a lot of fun, if a little simple. Dancing is split between two difficulty modes, Normal and Pro, but I found myself wishing for something in between. Most songs were extremely easy to get 5-star ratings on your first try on Normal, if not your second. However playing songs on Pro, which offer far less guidance and change moves very quickly, was a bit overwhelming at first. You get used to it after a while, but a third option, or even a super high-end choice to not have any cue cards at all requiring choreography memorization, would have been great.
There will be 32 songs at launch in Dance Central VR, including:
Since I played on Quest the tracking did seem to have some limitations. A lot of dance moves ask you to spread your arms out wide and make a fist or twist them a certain way, but the tracking cameras seemed to miss those movements occasionally. The same goes for any sweeping gestures down below or up high. Generally if I made a conscience effort to keep my hands in front of me and not too far above, below, or to the side it didn’t matter, but you don’t want to be thinking about your hand placement around you when you’re trying to dance.
Visually it looks really good, but on the Quest I noticed some performance issues here and there. Frame drops were a problem during some songs and if the battery was running low (say 25% or lower) they seemed more frequent. I also perceived the fixed foveated rendering very obviously in Dance Central VR — something that was much less noticeable in other games.
Outside of dancing there is a wardrobe to customize your look, as well as multiplayer lobbies to queue up with other dancers. The social hub is a cool, fun place to hang out and talk, but then you can also have private dance battles with a variety of rulesets to pick from. You can even dance alongside a friend for co-op dances too so it’s not all competitive.
For players that want to get particularly serious about their dance moves there is also a studio. Here you can break down songs into their individual parts and dance moves and practice them in slow motion. The trainer will even show the arcs of your hand movements so you can clearly tell what you’re doing wrong. It’s a great training tool, but it never felt intense enough to really warrant that kind of belabored practice to me. I had more fun just dancing and acting silly.
As it stands, Dance Central VR doesn’t nail every move, but it more than sticks the landing when it comes to getting you moving and grooving to the beat of the music in VR. When you slide on a headset and let the music take over it’s genuinely easy to forget where you are in real life as you dance along to the rhythm. I’m a terrible dance, but Dance Central VR made me feel like I knew what I was doing. It’s got some technical hiccups and it’s a bit meandering in its focus, but the core mechanics are a lot of fun.
We’ll have our final verdict later on when the full game launches on May 21 for Oculus Quest and Rift S. Read our Game Review Guidelines for more information on how we arrived at this score.
Tagged with: Dance Central, Harmonix, Oculus Quest
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Valve is throwing a little bit of a “screw you” to Oculus this morning, announcing the specs of their high-end VR headset the Valve Index, just before Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some minor updates to the Rift.
The Valve Index is a high-end headset with few compromises. It’s $999 for the whole system but you can buy each of the components individually as well.
The headset’s 1440×1600 per eye display is the same as the Vive Pro but it features some insane 144 hz refresh rates and a much wider 130-degree field-of-view. The full system comes with Valve’s newly-names Index “Knuckles” controllers that developers have been playing with for the past year or two. Everything can be tracked by the SteamVR tracking sensors that came with your Vive or Valve’s new-generation trackers.
Pre-orders are launching tomorrow and the system ships June 28.
Valve fans rejoice! The company today unveiled its Index VR kit, which consists of a $500 headset, $279 controllers and $149 base station. You can get the entire kit for $1,000 or the headset and controllers for $749, or buy everything individually i...
If the Oculus Go was an appetizer for truly wireless VR, which is entirely self-contained and doesn't rely on a PC, the Quest is closer to a main course. It's not as immersive as desktop virtual reality, but it's currently the easiest way to show...
After months upon months of waiting, Oculus is finally ready to deliver its next generation of VR headsets. Both the stand-alone Oculus Quest and PC-dependent Oculus Rift S will be available to buy on May 21st in 22 countries, with pre-orders starti...
Mozilla's Firefox Reality browser has been available through a number of platform-specific VR portals, but it'll soon be available in a relatively neutral form. The developer has revealed that it's working with Valve to bring Firefox Reality to Steam...More than three years after Facebook released one of the biggest gambles in its existence, a virtual reality headset it paid billions to launch as its own, the company has grown more embattled but its moonshot VR flagship has grown safer.
Facebook’s sequel to the Oculus Rift is not the Rift 2, it is the Rift S. Just as the iPhone naming scheme denotes the tock to a tick rather than a full revolution; the latest product is a hardware update, albeit a pretty minor one, more of a 1.2 than a 2.0.
It wasn’t always going to be this way — the company’s founding CEO had other plans. But the Rift S represented a way for Facebook to push the accessibility of its most high-end headset and likely the profit margins of the cheaper-feeling headset, which does cost $399 versus the original Rift’s $349 price tag, a number that danced and dwindled its way down from a Rift + Touch launch price of $798 at the end of 2016.
[gallery ids="1819661,1819654,1819652"]
The hardware design isn’t really the story that Facebook and Oculus are pushing with the Rift S. The hardware is a product of sacrifices that give the entire headset a lower-end feeling than the Quest or Go, it was largely built by Lenovo after all; as such this release is mostly about the software advancements.
The built-in “Insight” tracking is the highlight and lowlight of the release. It’s undoubtably a downgrade from the full capabilities of its predecessor — while the headset tracks itself very well, I would frequently lose tracking on the controllers on the cameras’ peripheral– but it also makes the system considerably easier to set up and maintain. Gone are the external sensors and their damn driver updates, gone are the constant needs for recalibration when a headset was bumped out of place — this is a headset that learns from your space.
The external sensor system on the original Rift required three spaced out sensors in order to fully capture the total range of body motion. The headset only came with two sensors which minimized these capabilities and forced game developers to build titles that would constantly lead users to reorient themselves towards the sensors. No such reorienting is needed with the Rift S which brings the tracking cameras into the headset itself.
Features like the updated “Guardian” boundary setup and the passthrough camera that activates once you leave the safe space showcase some of the key learnings of the past few years and some of the added benefits of the onboard tracking. All of this feels very natural and mature.
While the headset’s onboard tracking feels great, the experience for controller tracking is more hit-or-miss. Common in-game motions like examining an object and turning the top of the controller away from you can lead to briefly obscuring the tracking rings and thus temporarily losing tracking. It always seems to recover, but there are moments in games where you are being chased and need to shoot behind you or grab something offscreen while maintaining focus on an object. These are moments where you see some short-sightedness in Oculus’s choice.
My first impressions of the Rift S were less than stellar, but after getting it in my home for some lengthy VR sessions, I’ve warmed up to it a little bit. It still doesn’t feel like a proper upgrade to a flagship headset that’s already three years old, but it is a more fine-tuned system that feels more evolved and dependable. There are still certainly some things I don’t like…
Things that are subpar:
Things that aren’t as subpar as I had feared:
It’s a headset that will offer more pleasant on-boarding and usage to new customers, but for what is supposed to be the industry’s leading high-end headset, Oculus has taken a small step back in performance.
For new customer that are looking for something more high-end than the Quest, the device still offers a lot of advantages. You’ll have some time to make a choice, pre-orders are live for the headset today, but it doesn’t ship until May 21.
Facebook’s new VR headsets, the Oculus Rift S and Quest, are both now live for pre-orders today at $399 and will ship May 21.
Oculus released the original Rift just over three years ago. Fast forward to the present and the Facebook VR product line has gotten more robust. The $199 Oculus Go offers a cheap arena to watch media content, Rift S offers a PC experience that can showcase complex gaming experiences while the Quest aims to be a good fit for novices looking for a portable VR experience.
Facebook hopes the Quest will bring in a new class of users into VR while the Rift S allows it to expand its concurrent reach on PC.
You can read reviews of both systems below:
Facebook and Valve support VR for different reasons.
Valve’s Steam storefront is the dominant digital distribution store on personal computers. Virtual reality creates new markets for content which Valve can sell to PC owners via Steam.
Facebook’s relationship to people is reliant on platforms controlled by other companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. VR offers an opportunity for Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook to loosen its dependence on those companies.
I start there in my Rift S review for a few reasons.
First, Facebook set its embargo for Rift S reviews at 10:30 AM Pacific on April 30 — mid-way through its keynote at the F8 developers conference which started at 10 AM.
About two hours before my hands-on time with the Valve Index HMD last week, a representative from Valve emailed me to say the company shifted its embargo time from May 1 to April 30 at 10 AM Pacific. Any sense of rivalry between these companies is not imaginary. It is fact.
Second, it is apparent Facebook prioritized one consideration in its design of the follow-up to 2016’s Oculus Rift. Above all else, Rift S makes it easier for new VR buyers to sign up for an Oculus account, set up their headset, and get into a virtual world delivered by Facebook.
Before Rift S arrived at my home on Friday last week I disconnected three USB cords from my PC.
Each cord ran to a sensor for tracking movement of the original Rift and its Touch controllers. At its discontinuation this month, Rift cost more than $400 for a complete “room-scale” system if you wanted all three sensors. For me, that meant running two of the three USB cords taped to my ceiling with the sensors mounted high on my walls so they could spot movement in almost any direction from the outside-in.
Rift S moves to “inside-out” tracking via five cameras on the headset itself to erase the need for those extra USB ports on the PC. This is the same “Insight” system deployed on Oculus Quest (via four cameras on that headset) and in my experience setting up Guardian boundaries works just as quickly and smoothly across both systems.
I spent the last three years setting up Oculus Rift sensors in dozens of configurations, buying USB extension cords, drilling holes in walls and, worst of all, dealing with trial-and-error PC issues across desktops and laptops as a result of hooking up three sensors and a VR headset.
I don’t think I can overstate how much of a delight the out-of-box setup experience is with Rift S in comparison to the original. You’re still limited to a tracked area tethered by a cord to your PC, although now it’s five meters instead of just four. Thankfully, now it’s no longer a huge inconvenience to simply just move the VR play area by a few feet. And, if you wanted to go portable, the inside-out tracking system is more friendly to backpack PCs.
The Insight system makes it easier to use Rift S with laptops, lowers the minimum PC specification overall, and also erases the considerable amount of time needed to mount the sensors and set up the tracking in the Oculus software. And the cost? A whole “room-scale” Rift S system starts at $399 with a pathway over the lifetime of the headset made by Lenovo to lower that price much more than Rift ever could.
By most (but not all) measures, Rift S widens the door to PC VR to accommodate a larger set of PC customers than the original released in 2016.
The next priority apparent in the Rift S design is cross-compatibility with other Oculus content and hardware.
Rift S is a bridge between the original Rift and its considerable library of PC-based content and the new Oculus Quest standalone headset, which is Facebook’s true play for mainstream users. For example, both Quest and Rift S use identical second-generation Touch controllers.
I found it relatively easy in my testing on Rift S to accidentally hit the Oculus button on these controllers. That can be fixed with software to ignore those presses during fast movement. Unfortunately, though, I also found the battery compartment on the new Touch controllers came loose in my hand easily enough to ruin playthroughs in games like Beat Saber.
On the Rift S HMD two sensors point to the sides, another looks up on the top of the device, and two more point straight-forward. For those counting, that’s one more sensor than Quest and three more than the many Microsoft headsets, including the new HP Reverb. We haven’t had enough access to hardware like Valve Index or HP Reverb to make meaningful comparisons to the overall tracking experience on these new 2019 VR headsets yet. Anecdotally, and with the video below, you can see the same general — if slightly reduced — occlusion issues with Rift S as seen with Insight on Quest.
Some of the interactions in competitive zero-gravity games Echo Arena and Echo Combat involve doing things without looking at your hands, like grabbing onto walls and objects to your side or behind you. In Rift S, sometimes the grip on the wall would fall away when trying to hold it while turning to do other things. The headset doesn’t release until May 21 so there is still time for Ready at Dawn to improve the experience prior to launch. Will all competitive VR games get updates to account for the differences of Rift S inside-out tracking though? Probably not — so this is something competitive gamers should take into account if these types of interactions are key to your play style.
Though my initial impressions of Rift S suggested so-called god rays were gone, after a couple days with the headset it is apparent those visual artifacts are drastically reduced compared with the original Rift — but not completely eliminated. The screen-door effect is dramatically reduced as well, but it is still there and the lenses still catch light in some distracting ways. I prefer the Rift S optical design to both the Vive and Vive Pro as well for the same reasons — reductions in visual artifacts compared with the earlier systems.
The frame rate of the display is reduced from 90 hz to 80 hz from Rift to Rift S, but I can’t say the difference is noticeable. What’s more noticeable, though, is the resolution improvement and overall clarity of the optics. The original Rift used dual OLED panels for a total resolution of 2160×1200. Rift S replaces it with a single LCD panel with a resolution of 2560×1440. To be clear about this — I personally wouldn’t go back to the original Rift (or Vive or Vive Pro) from Rift S for any reason.
One note though — Rift S features software adjustment for interpupillary distance (IPD). Its lenses are fixed at 63.5 mm from one another, which means Facebook says they are “best” for users with IPDs of between 61.5 and 65.5mm. I’m outside that range, I believe, on the high end. No matter if I left the software adjustment at the default or moved it outside the “best” range to 67.5, I didn’t feel like it had a noticeable effect on my visual experience.
With the Valve Index physical adjustment, though, I could move the slider and see millimeter by millimeter the effect on my stereoscopic vision. On Index, IPD adjustment had a dramatic effect on my perception of depth and clarity. Rift S didn’t. I haven’t had enough time with the Index headset, though, to say anything more definitive about these differences.
Rift S uses an open-ear sound design that incorporates audio into the head strap. This means the audio experience should provide more comfort, generally, compared with any designs which touch the ears. This design should also make it easier to hear things from two realities — while also letting people nearby hear what’s going on in the virtual world. There’s a 3.5 mm headphone jack for folks who want to add headphones for private audio.
Two days before Rift S arrived at my house, I put on Valve Index and let the near-field speakers hover right outside the surface of my ears as I played Beat Saber. This effectively destroyed my first impressions of Beat Saber in Rift S. All I could do in Rift S was remember the things I heard in my Index demo that I couldn’t hear in Facebook’s new PC VR headset. And the Valve design still allowed me to hear things from two realities with the same level of off-ear comfort.
I believe Rift S to be a generally better overall experience than Vive Pro, Vive and the original Rift for only $400. I couldn’t have torn down those original Oculus sensors any faster.
There are notable caveats, though, for people with unusual IPDs or those who spend many hours in one specific virtual world that depends on some behind-the-back gestures which might escape the Insight tracking system. If that’s you, you might wait for developers to further optimize their apps for this new tracking system before upgrading.
Also, when it comes to Rift S vs. Index, or even Rift S versus HP Reverb or Pimax, we can’t make any more definitive recommendations just yet due to lack of significant time with those other pieces of hardware.
Rift S, then, continues the legacy set by its predecessor in accessing the largest and highest quality PC content library available from both Oculus and Steam. The headset won’t work in the dark, which is a bummer, but the convenience of the setup should reduce store returns and smooth out the overall experience of donning a PC VR headset.
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The post Rift S Hardware Review: A Simplified PC VR Headset Focused On Easier Setup And Lowering Cost appeared first on UploadVR.
Today at the F8 2019 developers conference, Facebook have announced that both the standalone Oculus Quest VR headset and the new Oculus Rift S VR headset are releasing on May 21, 2019 and are available for pre-orders starting today. You can pre-order the Quest directly from Oculus here or pre-order the Rift S directly from Oculus here. Both headsets will cost $399, but the Rift S also requires a VR-capable PC to power it.
You can read our full, detailed reviews of both headsets on the site now — Facebook sent us review units of both headsets. Our Oculus Rift S review is here and our Oculus Quest review is here. We’ve also got technical breakdowns of the Rift S here and Quest here.
Every Oculus Quest retail unit (both the 64GB and 128GB models) will come pre-loaded with five VR game demos, in addition to the standard offering of things like TV apps and Oculus Videos. The five VR game demos are Beat Saber, Creed, Journey of the Gods, Space Pirate Trainer, and Sports Scramble. It does not sound like Quest will come bundled with any full games at launch other than free experiences like Rec Room that will be available for download. You can see the full list of all 50+ planned day one launch titles for Quest right here.
There will also be a $40 travel case custom-made to fit your Oculus Quest, two Touch controllers, and charging cables.
Both of these VR headsets are powered by Facebook’s new Insight tracking system which uses cameras on the headsets themselves to track the room and your movement through it. They also both use the exact same Touch controllers to let you operate your hands inside the virtual space.
The biggest difference here is that the Oculus Quest is a totally self-contained device that functions in a standalone capacity. That means you don’t need a phone, game console, or PC to power it at all. However, you’re sacrificing power and fidelity for that freedom. So even though you can set it up easily and quickly in any room at your home or take it to another location by just stuffing it in a bag, it will never equal the power of a PC-powered device.
Then the Rift S is Oculus’ successor to their flagship Rift headset. They’re discontinuing the original Rift and replacing it with the Rift S so you no longer need to setup cameras and you get a decent bump in resolution as well, but the tracking suffers a tiny bit since the cameras on the headset have limited range when it comes to reaching your hands out wide, behind your back, or behind your head.
Stay tuned at UploadVR for more coverage of the Rift S and Oculus Quest in the weeks leading up to launch and keep an eye on our list of cross-buy titles if you’re interested in both platforms. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Tagged with: F8, Oculus Quest, Ocuus Rift S
The post Oculus Quest And Rift S Launch May 21, Pre-Orders Now Available appeared first on UploadVR.
