8 / 10

Oculus

The march of technology is rarely at an even tempo. Sometimes it’s a rapid sprint forwards, with an epoch-defining shift – smartphones going mainstream, for instance. Other times, it’s more of a shuffle, where a product is clearly edging towards something greater, but isn’t there just yet. For Oculus’s second cordless virtual reality headset, the Oculus Quest, it’s the latter case.

Make no mistake – the enhancements over last year’s Oculus Go make it seem like the Quest is one of those epochal shifts. It’s such an improvement, Oculus is now repositioning the Go as an entry-level VR experience, better tailored to video or simple games, while Quest pursues the cordless VR dream with a more powerful processor (a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip), an increased per-eye resolution of 1440x1600px, and crucially, two dedicated Oculus Touch controllers to allow for a full-range of in-world interaction – a massive step up from the Go’s simple, singular pointer.


The Quest, which is available to pre-order now and ships on May 21, also carries over some of the best elements of the Go. A glasses spacer allows you to add an extra centimetre or so of depth into the headset, beneath the padding, allowing bespectacled users to enjoy a comfortable fit without sacrificing their vision. It also retains in spatial audio, directing reasonable sound quality to the wearer’s ears, while also providing a headphone jack for dedicated audio.

In terms of comfort, the Quest’s 571 gram weight makes for a noticeable heft on your head, but not an unwieldy one. Adjustable straps at the top and sides, along with a fixed bracket around the crown of your head, make it easy to ensure a personalised fit, while retractable ‘arms’ with pivot points allows a primary user to wear and remove the headset without constantly readjusting it. That, coupled with the Quest’s auto-standby after 15 seconds of inactivity, makes it considerably easier to jump in and out of VR.

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Oculus

Initial set-up is simple enough, requiring no prior knowledge of VR. With the Quest doing all the work internally, unlike desktop-bound Oculus Rift, all that’s required to get started is a smartphone with the Oculus app installed. A brief lens guide requiring you to adjust sliders to bring lines into focus – akin to an optician’s appointment – also introduces some of the physical features of the headset, such as a manual focus spacer, before the tutorial introduces some of Quest’s most impressive features.


One is its Guardian system. The Quest is equipped with four ultra-wide angle, externally facing sensors that remove the need for secondary sensors to track your positioning.

These onboard sensors do a remarkable job of detecting depth and surroundings, marking out floor level without fail. Rather than rely on any kind of alert system if you stray too close to a bookcase or desk, you’ll actually draw out a bespoke area for free-standing play space, which creates a virtual walled garden. Approach the limits, and a grid will warn you you’re too close to your boundaries; cross the line and whatever you’re doing will suspend and trigger another cool trick - ‘Passthrough+’.

This is Oculus’s way of letting you see the real world beyond the visor. The greyscale view is fuzzy, and creates an odd sensation when the image feed is slightly slower than what your brain expects to perceive from your surroundings, but it’s useful for seeing what’s around you, or finding the controllers if you’ve put them down, without having to fully remove the headset.

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And, chances are, you won’t want to remove the headset all that often. The fidelity of experience is up there with PC-linked VR, from the incredibly charming First Steps software tutorial (dance with a cute robot!) to rhythm-action masterpiece Beat Saber, temporally malleable shooter Superhot, or frightfest Face Your Fears II, Quest excels at drawing you into incredible worlds.


Even simpler experiences such as Wander – a navigable collation of 360° Street View images, allowing you to tour the globe from your living room – are incredibly absorbing, letting you to revisit favourite holiday locations, or get a boots-on-the-ground feel for places you’ve yet to travel to.

New controllers

Oculus

The Touch controllers are the biggest advantage here, slightly revised and improved from the original Rift-compatible versions. The signature ring design now sits above the buttons on each grip controller, while triggers and side grips map accordingly to the left and right hand. This allows for incredible dexterity, even letting you pass objects from one hand to another, and expanding the ways in which you interact with objects and game worlds.

Nordic adventure-RPG Journey of the Gods puts this to good use with a crossbow you manually reload, or a sword and shield in different hands tracking your movements perfectly. The triggers seem to be capacitive, too, with the slightest brush against them closing a fist or pointing a finger. This finesse is put to great use in games such as Dance Central, where you can browse an in-game smartphone almost as accurately as using one in the real world. After a while, you may even forget you’re using the controllers rather than your own hands, they’re that good.

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The relationship between the headset’s sensors and the Touch controllers was flawless out of the box, too. Not once did one or both controllers de-sync, and their positioning remained appropriately relative to physical positioning in any piece of software. Tracking and positioning are leagues better than on Go, which frequently required you to reset perspective.

However, in using the Quest for a prolonged period, you start noticing some of its drawbacks – and perhaps even the downsides of cordless VR as a whole. Despite the increased resolution of the OLED panel housed inside the headset, you’ll be able to detect pixels with relative ease. Art direction dependent on the game can help here, with more cartoonish efforts less likely to distract with rogue pixels, but the more realistic a title aims to be, the more the pixels draw you right back out of it.

Oculus

Then there’s battery life, which is a mixed bag. Quest boasts an improved use/charge ratio over Go – roughly two-to-three hours use, and a two-hour recharge period. That’s impressive, given how much more the Quest is doing, and you’ll get enough juice from it to commit to longer play sessions.

It’s still shorter than we’d like though, and you’ll likely have nagging thoughts over how long you’ve got left. Thankfully, this is mitigated somewhat by the generous two-metre USB-C power cord – perfect for seated games, and long enough for you to still play standing VR titles, if adding a trip hazard for anything requiring you to take actual steps.

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The Quest is equipped with four ultra-wide angle, externally facing sensors that remove the need for secondary sensors to track your positioning Oculus

Which brings us to potentially the biggest problem. Oculus doesn’t really use the term ‘cordless’ when referring to Quest (or Go, for that matter) preferring ‘roomscale’, meaning an area you can actually walk around in real space while your head is in VR. When you set up your Guardian boundaries for Quest, you’ll need a minimum of two metres squared of open space – anyone with smaller confines may struggle to even use the roomscale features (although you can override the warning over recommended space, and you’ll still get the Guardian lines).

Should you be able to meet the 2m² space requirement, you’ll soon realise that while it’s fine for arm-waving games, its less suited to exploratory titles. Take two steps, and you’re at the boundary. Turn around, take two more, and you’re at the limit again. Even after rearranging furniture to map out a decadent 3m² space, it became easier to just use the Touch controller’s thumbsticks to move around game worlds, and stand in place in the real one. This feels like a problem with the very concept of cordless VR, one that currently lacks a satisfying solution.

However, even if a carefree stroll around VR is a pipe dream hindered by pesky reality, Quest’s cutting of the cord is laudable. It allows the hardware to deliver immersive worlds and fully interactive experiences, while removing the safety concerns of tripping or catching on tethered cables when playing more active games – see the aforementioned Beat Saber.

Verdict

Oculus Quest offers one of the best VR options to date, perhaps matched only by PlayStation VR for the balance of cost versus quality of experience. Even there, Quest just about nudges the win thanks to its freedom of movement and the versatility offered by the Oculus Touch controllers.

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However, once the dazzle has faded after your first few breathtaking hours, the still-noticeable pixels, middling battery life, and real world limitations of ‘roomscale’ VR remind you that while Quest is a massive leap forward for VR tech, it’s not the breakthrough moment that defines an era – at least not yet.

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