October 07, 2024
Announced today Sept 26, 2018, at the Oculus Connect 5 event, The Oculus Quest will be the consumer product to come from the Oculus Santa Cruz R&D project. The headset was announced to retail for $399 with a target release for “Spring 2019” (we can probably assume a March 2019 release).
The Oculus Quest will be Oculus’s second mobile VR all-in-one and will be their first all-in-one headset to feature inside-out 6DoF (Six-degree of freedom) head tracking along with “Room Scale” and dual Six degrees of freedom 3D hand controllers.
The Oculus Quest will not be the first mobile VR all-in-one unit to ship with inside out tracking (that prize goes to the Lenovo Mirage Solo headset), but it will be the first all-in-one to ship with dual 3D 6DoF hand controllers and the first to utilize four cameras on the headset for fluid and accurate tracking.
For desktop VR experiences like the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive line. The user has to set up VR sensors around the room. The sensors are only compatible with certain size areas and they are wired. The setup is quite cumbersome. You may have three sensors placed around a room, all with wires running to the PC along with a tether cable containing: Power, Video/audio, and USB running from the headset to the back of the PC of course for this experience you must have a high powered PC and graphics card.
Being able to move around a fixed physical space and have that movement map to virtual movement in the apps Oculus calls Room Scale. Room Scale is found on the Oculus Rift but not the Oculus Go. The Oculus Quest will provide Room Scale without the wires and the inside-out tracking means that you will not need room sensors.
Head tracking on VR headsets come in two flavors 3DoF and 6DoF. 3DoF tracking means you can move your head left, right up, and down and have a fluid VR experience around a fixed point (think a camera that can turn and pivot on a tripod) but the headset will be restricted from being able to track your movement beyond the fixed point. For example, if you kept your neck still and leaned forward a 3DoF headset (like the Oculus Go or Google Daydream viewers) can’t track that. 6DoF head tracking enables that. The Oculus Quest will have 6DoF head tracking and Room Scale.
As for the mechanics of how Oculus is achieving Room Scale through their inside-out (four-camera) tracking system, that’s proprietary knowledge and they aren’t really getting into the details in the dev talks. But if you really want to know the high-level details, perhaps have a look through their patents.
3D controllers have been with us for some time (remember the Nintendo Wii) modern VR 3D controllers are an evolution on the concept. In addition the X, Y, Z tracking there’s a thumbstick, triggers, traditional gamepad buttons, and a ring that tracks finger movements. The video below shows the Rift controllers, but it was announced that the Oculus Quest controllers will provide the same capabilities. This opens the door to Oculus Rift games being ported to Oculus Quest.
Oculus did not reveal the under the hood tech of the Oculus Quest, but developers have had the Quest dev kits for some time now and many have reported that it will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835. Even if Oculus opts to upgrade that spec to the more modern Snapdragon 845, there is still going to be a significant discrepancy between the graphical capabilities of the Oculus Quest and the “high-end” VR experiences found on the Rift and Vive. If you are a gamer and high-polygon count, high quality lighting, textures, etc.. is important to you then you should know the Oculus Quest is going to still be firmly in the mobile VR category and a lot closer to the Oculus Go in terms of graphical capabilities than to the Rift.
