This technique underlies all opaque mixed reality headsets, multiple of which are expected to launch in the coming months. Soon after, you could even use this instead of a fully virtual environment. Less than 6 months later however, the headset received an update that did indeed reconstruct a depth-correct real world view at correct scale, with Facebook citing “advancements in high-performance image processing and 3D computation” to explain how it became possible. At launch you could only see through them to set up your Guardian boundary, because the scale and depth of the image didn't match reality. These cameras were not designed to actually be viewed though. Like its successor, the original Quest uses cameras on the front to track its position in your play space and the infrared LEDs on the controllers. But the original Quest set the stage for this to happen.Īnd in another way, Quest also set the stage for the next era of headsets just starting to arrive today - somewhat accidentally. Within 18 months Facebook replaced it with the cheaper and much faster Quest 2, which became arguably the first mainstream VR headset. And its fabric wrapping, intricate lens separation mechanism, and OLED panels made it much more difficult to manufacture than Go. It launched with a two year old chipset, the reason it's now already being deprecated. Quest was a flawed device though of course. For much of 20 Oculus Quest regularly sold out, with Facebook claiming it was "selling them as fast as we can make them". The market response to Oculus Quest was instantly clear. Mark Zuckerberg announces Oculus Quest, September 2018 What it really offered was PC VR on a diet, not just Go on steroids. Quest was the perfect device for this, bridging the room-scale tracking and tracked controllers of PC VR with the standalone wireless nature of Oculus Go. That crown goes to the new level of interactivity provided by being able to directly use your hands, and the novel gameplay these interactions open up. High fidelity VR has a place in the market, and can certainly be breathtaking, but it isn't what makes VR unique and interesting to most people. No one starts to play Beat Saber and complains it doesn't look like Cyberpunk 2077, or that Superhot VR doesn't look like Mirror's Edge. Most thought it might support simple games like Job Simulator and Superhot, while very few expected it would one day get full-fledged titles like The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, Onward, and Zenith: The Last City.īut the necessary magic of VR was never in the graphical fidelity anyways. Many saw it as nothing more than a souped-up Go. It's easy to forget just how negative the sentiment toward Quest was from much of the VR industry from the moment it was announced. For almost everyone, good VR was simply out of reach. These limitations meant Oculus Go received almost none of the VR content people actually wanted, like Beat Saber. And its basic laser pointer remote only let you select menu items, not directly interact with virtual objects. If you actually moved your head positionally, the entire virtual world appeared to move with your head, rather than your head moving through it. And unless you strapped a $300 wireless adapter to the crown of your head after mounting its transmitter and two base stations on your wall - your connection to that PC or PS4 was a thick & heavy tether.įor the majority of people, who owned neither a gaming PC nor a PS4 and simply didn't want one, the only real option for VR was the Oculus Go, which lacked positional tracking. Four years ago this week, Oculus Quest started shipping and changed VR forever.īefore Quest, the only way to get a consumer VR setup with positional tracking and tracked controllers was through a gaming PC or PlayStation 4.
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