At the end of September, our virtual reality development team took a road trip to Oculus Connect 5 in San Jose. Every year that we’ve attended, OC has featured exciting news on coming releases, cutting-edge demos, and the opportunity to network and bond with other innovative teams. This year was no different, with a fair share of frustrations and triumphs.

Takeaways

While debriefing from the conference, we discussed our key takeaways. Most of the team converged on several shared sentiments regarding the state of technology, our development, and the market as a whole.

Standalone VR is Ready — Oculus Quest

In January, anticipating the release of wireless consumer headsets, we declared 2018 the year of standalone VR. Unfortunately, most lightweight solutions to date have been head fakes at a truly mobile headset. While the Oculus Go packed a serious resolution bump and the Lenovo Mirage demonstrated inside-out motion control, no wireless hardware truly emulated the functional immersion of the Rift or ViveX.

At OC5, Mark Zuckerburg announced the release of the long-anticipated Oculus Quest (codenamed Santa Cruz). After spending some time in prototypes, it’s clear to Nanome that a lot of things are going to change.

Quest’s inside-out tracking and motion control mimic the Rift’s accuracy with an additional dimension of wireless freedom. At 1600 x 1440 pixels per eye, the Quest leaps over the Rift’s resolution. Most importantly, the best demos we experienced were visually indistinguishable from the Rift and Vive.

At a $400 all-inclusive price point, the Quest is set to soothe our main customer acquisition growing pain: hardware costs. The Quest will drastically reduce onboarding time and make for a generally more pleasant user experience. This is crucial for our professional customer base- most of whom are not gamers and have no time for bulky hardware setups.

Optimizing For Quest Won’t Be Easy

Despite the promise of Quest, many members of our team expressed concern about the transition. Seeing as we’ve already slaved over efficient graphics rendering for Rift, additional optimization for Quest is a daunting proposition. Many simple gaming demos suffered substantial frame-rate issues and visual latency. Simulating with scientific accuracy is computationally intensive on desktop rigs, mobile will be another animal entirely.

Quest will require many new design considerations: inverted Touch controller shapes interfere with our wristwatch menu system, motion tracking range is limited, etc. Implementation will undoubtedly require some sacrifices, but the consensus is that they’ll pay off. Bringing a Nanome experience to researchers and students without the laptop, sensors and wires, is our ultimate goal and a potentially huge catalyst for our ecosystem. We’ve been waiting for hardware like Quest because we know we’re up to the challenge.

VR Needs Diverse Experiences + Connections

Gaming-centricity was far and above our team’s largest gripe with OC5. Understandably, gaming is the best market for massive customer acquisition. Gamers drive the demand for improved visual experiences and intuitive control. We take our fair share of UX notes from gaming experiences’ creative menus and interaction. We hope that Quest will not continue to be marketed exclusively as a gaming console. Oculus has expressed that they hope to make the VR community as diverse as reality by supporting all types of development. We’re crossing our fingers that they deliver.

We encountered several other teams developing technical and educational products, all of whom shared our frustration. The potential of modern VR spans far beyond gaming and entertainment. Even Oculus envisions VR as a tool for connecting people, especially for social purposes. Sadly, very few Quest demos featured any notable multiplayer networking. There was little emphasis on social VR applications, (forgo a massive Western shootout title).

Next Year

By this time next year, the Quest ecosystem should be in full swing and the feasibility of ubiquitous consumer VR will be tested. We’ll work alongside the Oculus community to prove VR the next interfacial breakthrough for gaming, social, and technical applications. See you there.

A recap video will be on YouTube shortly.