This could be the summer of broken Quests…. but it doesn’t have to be!

I predict there will be plenty of people taking new Quests to the park or beach to show their friends, but while you can be careful it’s still very easy to destroy your Quest, and much more likely for friends who don’t even realize the danger to ruin your new toy.

This comes from the fact that if you point the lenses at the sun it focuses onto the display and will instantly burn out the focal point, ie the OLED displays.

Sun damaged vive screen

BUT, Oculus could add at least a toggleable audible warning to each headset to hopefully prevent some of this potential damage from happening. If it knows your approximate location on earth, which it can easily get from an IP address, and also knows the time and date, it can calculate the position of the sun at any given time. It also knows the rotation of the HMD, so it would be fairly easy to add a warning noise if the Quest is not on someones face and is about to be rotated to burn out its displays.

It’s not a perfect solution, but I would rather have something than nothing since it’s so easy to forget this is a danger.