SAN JOSE, Calif.—Last year, Oculus unveiled ambitious plans for a totally wireless virtual reality headset, and the idea sounded great... until we tried it. The company's "Santa Cruz" prototype was impressive enough at first blush, thanks to an "inside-out" tracking system that removed complications like wires, webcams, and tracking boxes. But our eyes-on experience was so-so at best and bumpy at worst.

What a difference a year makes.

Oculus' latest Santa Cruz prototype still has a few significant question marks, but 15 minutes of exploring, waving, throwing, and shooting, all without wires or glitches, made us start to believe that decent, wireless VR might arrive way sooner than we'd previously expected.

Inside-out turns expectations upside-down

Unfortunately, thanks to a behind-closed-doors test at this year's Oculus Connect 4 conference, you're going to have to take my word for it. I'm not even allowed to play back the audio I recorded of how much I oohed and ahhed about my Santa Cruz 2.0 experience.

For the uninitiated: Oculus has built this prototype headset to rely heavily on something called inside-out tracking. Every major home VR system on the market today (meaning, Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR) requires either an external camera to keep tabs on headsets and hand controllers, or external "dumb boxes" for the headset to recognize. Inside-out tracking, on the other hand, puts active sensors on the headset itself and requires no other positional objects around your room.

Ideally, these sensors, combined with other motion-tracking systems, keep tabs on your real-life position to the tune of a 90Hz refresh. In doing so, the headset can constantly render and refresh an image in your VR lenses that tricks you into feeling like you're really somewhere else.

Santa Cruz goes one further with another major difference from the current home-VR fray: its entire computing unit is built into the headset, not an external game system or PC.

This combination of spiffy tricks sounds like a recipe for compromise, and last year, that proved to be the case. Our test of the first Santa Cruz prototype would occasionally glitch out, as if it struggled to track our movements around an "average living room," and its VR environments were sparse and kind of ugly, akin to something on the weak Samsung GearVR or Google Daydream platforms. Worse, Oculus' first test didn't include any hand-tracked controllers.

What has changed in a year? In short, all three of those above complaints have been pretty much remedied without apparent compromises to headset size or comfort.













The Santa Cruz 2.0 headset looks almost identical to the current Oculus Rift VR headset, save a few differences. For one, instead of preinstalled headphones, Santa Cruz employs an open-speaker system that can be heard by anybody else in the room. The result was quite impressive, in that my field of hearing was overwhelmed enough by stereo sound where I occasionally thought I was actually somewhere else. Though that sensation wasn't always maintained, I also really appreciated how much easier it was to hear nearby people who wanted to talk to me so that I didn't have to push a speaker off my ear and shout "WHAT?!" (I do that a lot with both the Rift and the updated HTC Vive.)

This wireless version is clearly heavier than its wired sibling, though Oculus couldn't confirm an exact weight. My initial attempt to put the headset on was awkward, and I definitely noticed the heft, which Oculus reps confirmed has been shifted toward the front of the Santa Cruz prototype (it was initially a back-loaded headset). When I took it off and put it back on again, I figured out how to clench the headset's newly expanded back strap a little more firmly on my head. This resulted in a far more comfortable fit for my 15 minutes of demo time, insomuch as I didn't notice any bulk or headset wobbling while moving around.

And I moved around a lot. I jumped. I ducked. I knelt and quickly scanned floors, and I spun around. I waved my arms in front, to my sides, and behind my head. None of this resulted in lost tracking or glitchy "warping" beyond the tiny hitches that I consider forgivable even on the HTC Vive (which I consider the gold standard in terms of "room-scale" VR tracking).

Cruz control

Notice the part about my hands. Yes, the Oculus Santa Cruz prototype now includes hand-tracked controllers, and they're not just styled like the current Oculus Touch controllers already on the market. They're updated.





Gone are the Touch's set of "ABXY" buttons (two per hand) and pair of joysticks. In their place is a large, circular trackpad on which VR users can rest, rub, and click each of their thumbs. Functionally, it's the same pad found on HTC Vive wands and Microsoft Holographic controllers, with discrete touch-sensitive zones, though Oculus declined to answer my questions about how exactly it functions. The company says it is still exploring how the Santa Cruz hand controllers will look and work when they're eventually shipped to developers in "early 2018," but Oculus reps did seem bullish about replacing the joysticks and buttons. ("You can now 'pinch' in VR" using this pad, Oculus hardware PM Sean Liu told Ars.)

Just like Oculus Touch, these controllers also have plastic halos full of infrared-friendly dots, but they're positioned above users' hands, not around them, so that the Santa Cruz headset's four built-in tracking sensors can see and recognize them more efficiently. Unlike PlayStation Move wands or current Oculus Touch controllers, when you wave these new controllers behind your head, then whip them forward, Santa Cruz does a much better job tracking and maintaining their position and what they were previously holding. (This still proved a little glitchy, and I hope Oculus adds one more backward-facing sensor for the sake of, say, pulling back a virtual bow-and-arrow string.)

My first demo was a simple, colorful demo in which I fed and played fetch with a virtual pet. It wasn't terribly active, but I still tried to push Santa Cruz to its limits, whether by violently throwing a stick from behind my head, juggling fruits that I was supposed to give to the pet, or closely examining textures and geometry around my VR playspace. I was able to walk around in a square area that seemed comparable to the largest HTC Vive radius of 11.5 feet squared, but I couldn't officially measure that before or after my test. And while the colorful outdoor scene wasn't as sharp as some of Oculus' most intense shooter games, it handily outpaced the fidelity of GearVR. Even better, its field of view appeared to be identical to that of Oculus Rift, as opposed to the narrower GearVR FOV.

The second demo, dubbed Timestall, was an action-puzzle experience in which I had to protect a medical container from a volley of gunfire and explosive debris. I did this by freezing time and individually swatting, grabbing, shooting, and otherwise redirecting every destructive shard about to crack my precious cargo open. This was quite the Santa Cruz show-off experience, similar to the likes of Superhot VR, and it let me rapidly move around a bunch of slow-motion robots, drones, rocks, and metal while standing on a grated platform high above a bunch of other geometry. This was clearly set in a small, contained room, as opposed to a warp-around-and-battle type of PC VR game, yet its mix of smooth animations, complex characters, and general depth outpaced most GearVR games I've played.

Even better, I almost completely lost track of this cool-looking demo's biggest perk: no wires. I didn't have to buck my legs like a donkey with wire worries at my feet. I didn't have to wonder if a webcam would notice my every move. I simply played. In this frantic, save-the-cargo demo, getting lost in that reality was half the fun.

[Update, 4:26 p.m. ET: In great news, Oculus snuck me into another demo on Thursday: a single-player Santa Cruz build of the Oculus Rift shooting game Dead and Buried. This active game, which required that I shoot two pistols at waves of zombies while actively dodging melee and sniper attacks, further proved the fidelity and graphical horsepower shown in my other demos. This was the most graphically complex demo of the three, with detailed enemies rushing towards me and a ton of enemies and buildings positioned around me on mine-like crags. For this test, I added a few new kooky moves, including rapid 360-degree spins around in place while shooting the demo's pistols, and Santa Cruz continued to keep up with my rapid movements.

I took a closer look at the demo room, as well, and this time, I noticed a large, flat painting mounted on the ceiling that had a mostly square-grid arrangement of ceiling tiles and skylights. This, as commenters have suggested, looks like the kind of "anchoring" detail that the Santa Cruz headset's mounted cameras may rely on to recognize a user's position. Oculus reps would not answer whether that ceiling tile was designed specifically with the prototype in mind. Instead, they insisted that Santa Cruz is being designed to work in a "ton" of different home environments.]

Old questions answered, new ones appear

Our question used to be, "when will Santa Cruz deliver on its promise of quality wireless VR?" Now that I've enjoyed a truly convincing Santa Cruz experience, however, the question has shifted: how much will this combination of smooth tracking, handheld controllers, high performance, and low weight cost? Or is Oculus' specialized prototype going to be prohibitively expensive for a long time?

Oculus has no answers for that question just yet. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg confirmed to Oculus Connect 4 attendees that developers will begin receiving their own Santa Cruz prototypes "later this year," but nobody at Oculus has estimated a timetable for its consumer launch, let alone a price or an official name. The company also wasn't ready to answer questions about estimated specs.

Instead, Oculus cofounder and "head of Rift" Nate Mitchell confirmed in an Ars Technica interview that Oculus will position Santa Cruz as the middle product in a three-tier headset strategy, between the affordability and reduced performance of mobile platforms (Oculus Go, GearVR) and the higher-end, PC-powered Rift (and its potential successors). Mitchell used the slick, high-end game Robo Recall as a comparison point, saying that Santa Cruz would probably not run that game in its current state.

Thus, Santa Cruz appears destined to hew to a lower-end spec, but we're not about to attach firm expectations to how its final version will end up. Just imagine if we'd done that one year ago.