virtual reality oculus quest launch

Oculus announces Oculus Quest: 6 DOF, Snapdragon 835 VR, disruptive $399 price

In the end, the time has come: Oculus has officially revealed the name and the price of the Santa Cruz headset. Its name will be Oculus Quest and will cost $399.

I followed today’s OC5 conference via Facebook streaming only for this moment and Oculus has not disappointed my expectations.

After some minutes from the beginning of the keynote, Zuck has said that in his opinion VR should be standalone, 6 DOF and feature full hands presence. At that point we were all thinking “ok, now tell us about the Santa Cruz!” and he has satisfied us. He introduced us to “Oculus Quest”, that is the actual commercial name of the Santa Cruz.

My first thought has been “meh”, honestly I expected a more exciting name… “Quest” is in line with all other names of the devices, very short and effective (“Go”, “Rift”, etc…) but instinctively I thought that this name doesn’t fit the device at all. (Why quest? What quest should help me in going in? Mah. “Go” made sense, because it is a device you can carry with you and enjoy on the go… but Quest?)

Anyway, after the reveal we have been able to admire how the Quest is made: it is in line with what we have seen from previous Oculus Connect and from online patents. It basically seems an Oculus Rift without cables and with four cameras on the front. During the keynote, everyone has highlighted that the Controllers are almost identical to the ones of the Rift and this makes easier for developers to port PC games to Quest.

virtual reality oculus quest launch
Oculus Quest Controllers: they have exactly the same input of the Touch Controllers (Image by Oculus)

The reveal video has also confirmed the weird design with two audio plugs, one for each side of the headset, that opens up the road for a new audio accessory sold by Oculus.

Regarding the specifications of this new headset, gathering infos here and there we have a quite clear picture. The headset is clearly based on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 VR reference design. We know this because Oculus has explicitly declared this on its developers’ blog:

Oculus Quest runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 mobile chip set, providing the device with lightning fast performance speeds. The entire headset has been designed to maximize the performance of this processor, from advanced thermal venting to OS-level performance improvements.

This clarifies the doubts of people that were convinced that Quest would be able to play games like Robo Recall. It is just a standalone headset, based on the same reference design of Vive Focus and Lenovo Mirage Solo… and having tried the last two, I can assure you that the computational power is not even comparable to the one of a PC. Facebook people today talked about an experience with the same quality of the PC one, but they were clearly hinting only at the fact that Quest is a high-quality headset, that is well manufactured and has great games, exactly as the Rift. Furthermore, thanks to the fact that the Quest uses controllers identical to Touch, the Quest will feature a lot of game ported from PC. So, not an experience identical to the one of the PC, but one that will resemble it a bit.

At launch, Quest will feature more than 50 games and some of them will be very famous PC ones like Robo Recall, Moss and SuperHot VR. Of course, these will be optimized and reduced versions of the PC games, otherwise they couldn’t run on a mobile headset…. but I’m anyway excited. Robo Recall without wires! And without caring about the location of Constellation cameras… wow!! And then also a Darth Vader game is coming as a Quest exclusive! That’s an amazing move because the Star Wars brand can really move people into entering virtual reality!

So, again on specifications:

  • Snapdragon 835 VR reference design;
  • Same high-quality lenses of Oculus Go;
  • FOV around 95°-100°;
  • 1600×1440 per eye resolution;
  • 72 FPS;
  • Adjustable IPD;
  • 4 GB ram
  • 64 GB memory in its base $399 version;
  • Integrated audio (with better bass than Oculus Go integrated audio);
  • 6 DOF inside-out tracking of headset thanks to 4 integrated cameras (you will need to setup no camera in your room);
  • 6 DOF tracking of both controllers thanks to the cameras of your headset.

As you can see, it appears as a solid 835 VR headset. The tracking seems optimal since Oculus is so sure about its performances that is making people try a multiplayer game in the OC5 arena. That’s impressive!

Oculus Quest arena scale multiplayer shooter demo from oculus

The nice feature of this tracking technology is that it works on reconstructing the environment around the user. This means two things:

  1. The Guardian system can be set up in multiple rooms and the system will remember the Guardian setup for each room. While reviewing the Mirage Solo and the Focus I complained about their fixed 2m x 2m safety box from the starting point of the experience that has absolutely no sense in helping the user in feeling safe inside VR. With the Quest you will be able to have a real safety cage for each room… and the system will also remember it! This will be possible thanks to some CV + AI magic… and it reminds me a lot what HoloLens already does in its system;
  2. In the future, the Quest will allow for Mixed Reality experiences. Oculus just teased it, saying that it is a work in progress, but if the headset is able to reconstruct the whole environment, it will be possible to create experiences that merge the real and the virtual. IMHO it is a pity that it doesn’t also have two frontal cameras where there are the eyes of the user, because this would have allowed for an almost perfect MR (like the one we are doing for Beat Reality), but even without them some cool MR experiences are possible.
Oculus Quest Mixed Reality
Some prototype of Mixed Reality environment built over Oculus Quest: notice the outlines of the real world, with super-imposition of virtual elements (Image by Facebook)

This is the first true feature that has excited me about the Quest: all the other ones were something I was expecting (in the end it is a 835 VR headset), but environmental tracking at this quality was not. I imagined that they were working on MR somehow, but I expected something less. So, kudos to Oculus for this.

Then it came the moment for the announcement of the release date and price. The release date is “Spring 2019” and I guess that this means that the Quest will be released in May during the F8 conference… and the price is $399! When I heard $399 I couldn’t believe it… I thought they were talking about the Rift. And instead, they were talking about the Quest! My predicted price range was $400-$700, but I expected something like $500, so in line with the Vive Focus, but here we are at $400, so the price of the Lenovo Mirage Solo. But the Mirage Solo has lower resolution, less content, no integrated audio, and only one 3 DOF controller!

virtual reality oculus quest launch
WHAT? ONLY $399 ??? (Image by TechCrunch)

As you can see, that price is a complete killer for competitors. For sure Facebook with its deep pockets can afford to sell a headset earning very little from it (or even nothing) if it thinks that in the long run, this strategy will take all the money back when it will be the leader of the new mainstream technological platform, that is XR. $399 for those features is really an incredible price. As I’ve said above, Lenovo Mirage Solo will have hard times to compete with it, because for the same price offers a lot less. Google has teased some MR features and an additional accessory to enable 6 DOF tracking, to try to stay in par, but we have to see how much people will love these things. Vive Focus has the same headset specifications of Quest and also allows for MR and in the future will offer 6DOF controller tracking emulation… but it is predicted to cost $100 more and has a game library that is far inferior to Oculus’s one (to not speak about lenses quality and controller ergonomics, that are worse than the ones promised by this new headset).

This shows how on the consumer market, Oculus Quest will have almost no competition. It is a high-quality headset, featuring high-quality content at an affordable price. If competitors want to survive, they will have to offer more services or lower their prices. Or move to a different market. Vive is already a premium product on the PC platform and could position the Focus as a premium headset with dedicated services for education and such, for instance. HTC has the advantage to having the monopoly in China, where Oculus can’t sell its devices, so it could go all-in on the Chinese internal market (where B2B use of VR is enormous) and come back in the Western world only when it is ready to fight again with Oculus, maybe with a cheaper 6DOF Focus 2.0. Or it can start adding even more features to the one currently offered by the Focus through accessories and such.

These are all interesting possibilities, but what’s for sure is that today Oculus sets to be the most successful brand for consumer standalone headsets. Anyway, we have seen in these years that competition is beneficial for VR… I am sure that the other brands will fight back and we will benefit from this war.

virtual reality oculus quest launch
Yay! With Quest you can run, jump, crouch… and the tracking will continue to work! (Image by Oculus)

Notice that the low price of $399 could start cannibalizing the Rift itself. Rift isn’t getting any hardware updates and the company is clearly starting giving always more importance to Quest and Go (think how today’s event live stream in VR was not accessible through Rift…). Zuck itself said that VR in his opinion should be standalone. The Quest now costs exactly as the Rift, but it offers more freedom and easiness of use. Yes, it has not the computational power of a PC, but if you are not a hard gamer that cares a lot about graphics, you could really enjoy a simplified version of Robo Recall on the Quest and have tons of fun with it anyway. So, I envision the Quest stealing market shares of the Rift. It is a common consensus that standalone will be the widespread version of VR, while PC VR will be the premium products… Facebook knows this and so bets more on what will be the more popular headset.

A last thought about games: people with a Vive didn’t care much about Oculus exclusives because there was ReVive. But now that the Quest is standalone… how can a Vive Focus user play a game for Oculus Quest? He has not the Oculus Store and all the Oculus OS… maybe, in the end, exclusive titles will be really exclusive this time. And since Oculus loves releasing amazing exclusive games, this can be another big competitive advantage for them.

And this may also be bad for Steam… if all VR companies go standalone, VR players won’t buy games on Steam anymore… maybe this is the reason why there are so many rumors regarding a headset made by Valve itself. Who knows.

Oculus Quest has not been released yet, but it has already caused an earthquake in the VR ecosystem. Great move, Oculus.

(Header image by Oculus)


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15 thoughts on “Oculus announces Oculus Quest: 6 DOF, Snapdragon 835 VR, disruptive $399 price

  1. The price of this thing is really crazy for its features… I see hard times coming for the Focus, the Mirage and even high-end headsets. Anyway, “Rift-quality experiences”… come on Zuckerberg/Barra…

    Haven’t read many preliminar reviews yet, but any news on whether Quest titles will be backwards compatible with the Rift on PC? Considering the controllers layout is the same, have the same tracking capabilities, and the same Oculus tools will be used to develop them I guess it makes sense (and it would be great!), but that would hurt the possible exclusivity of Quest apps, so dunno…

    1. Ahahaha well, it’s marketing… it’s ok to make some little bold statements here and there to make people hyped! 🙂 The problem is that someone really believed that this meant that PC game could run on the Quest and this is no good at all :O

      Regarding the Focus, as I’ve written, China will save it. This because of the big Chinese internal market where the Quest can’t be sold, so the Focus is still maybe the best headset. And then I’m pretty sure that someway the Chinese govt is pushing HTC for now, and the Chinese govt has deep pockets. But for now, on the Western consumer market, Focus and Mirage will have hard times. And the simple PC headsets will start losing market shares. PC will become a premium experience of Pimax, StarVR, XTAL, Vive Pro, etc… At this time, I would advise my friends to buy the Quest and not the Rift.

      I think that if you develop in Unity, making the two builds will be just a matter of switching the build platform. Many devs will make it. Only Oculus exclusives for Quest won’t make it, I guess. The only possibility for this to not happen if Oculus raises the bar of quality of accepted games on PC Store to let enter only high-quality PC games

      1. Oculus has played a masterful hand with their new Quest headset. There has been a lot of negative comments on the VR forums about the Quest’s lack of GPU horsepower.

        However, they can leverage the Snapdragon 835VR SOC (I understand elements of 845 “6DOF hardware support” has been integrated into the SOC) with clever game design and graphic optimisation, it will impress no doubt with the Go’s lenses and higher resolution display panels. It doesn’t need to match PC VR to be compelling; Oculus already talk of a comprehensive launch portfolio.

        In contrast the Mirage has been woefully undersupported and unfortunately seems DOA, especially with its weird 6DOF/3DOF mismatch.

        The tetherless freedom of Quest with a scalable tracking system will be absolutely liberating and lend itself to interesting new XR experiences, as already see at OC5 with the arena scale multi player.

        Exciting times, no doubt! Happy VR 👍

        1. I think that Quest will bring a lot of flexibility and mobility to VR, and hopefully, a lot of new users as the Go has done (80% newcomers according to some #OC5 stats, pretty impressive!) but I also think that high-end PC VR will just keep running in parallel as another more sophisticated/premium platform. Don’t really know if Oculus will be leading this other pathway with all these new high-end headsets been recently released (StarVR, Pimax, etc), but in any case I see eSports, LBVR, research centers and consumers who want to have the ultimate VR experience still using it with the supporting horsepower of a PC. But yeah, in the end exciting times are coming!

          1. I honestly think that Oculus will favor mobile, because it is the best form factor for its final purpose: 1 billion people inside Facebook Spaces. My impression from the OC5 is that PC is not the main interest of the company: yes, PC VR is great for experimenting and studying the limits of technology… but it is not the form factor that XR will have 10 years from now.

        2. Yeah, I agree: it is possible to make nice games even on a mobile headset. Oculus has made a great job with Quest and for sure will sell well. At the moment this promises to be the best standalone headset on the market.

          For sure Google and HTC will reply. At this moment both will bet on MR, I guess (Google already announced that, HTC devs can exploit my plugin to do that)… but sooner or later they will have to ship a new device with full 6DOF support, if they want to survive. I think that who at the moment has more problems is Google… in the worst scenario, HTC can repair itself in China, where the Quest can’t be sold… but Daydream can’t enter in China and in the West, has the competition of Quest…

          1. Google is “interesting”. From an outside perspective Daydream is on life support, perhaps flat lining. Mirage is missing in action…

            Although the 6DOF dev kit for Mirage and recent job hiring for VR/AR shows some activity at the mothership in California

            However, this does not indicate more than an internal project. With Youtube VR coming to Go, perhaps we are seeing Google stepping back from hardware and realising more money from their software platform by opening it up to previous hardware competitors (like Valve with SteamVR)…

          2. Yes, I found strange that decision of Google, too. But I agree with you: I guess that they are making some experiments to see if they can earn more by providing services to headsets made by other vendors.

            Regarding the 6DOF kit of Mirage… I found it weird. I don’t know how many people will considering buying it…

          3. The 6DOF kit is only available for developers in the USA. From my limited understanding, VR/AR team is based there, we no longer have a team in the UK (they used to be based at the St Giles building behind New Oxford Street).

            Mirage is curious, I enjoyed my brief experience and considered purchase to enjoy standout Daydream titles in Worldsense, but the device seems like evolutionary deadend, especially with Quest bringing full 6DOF to mobile platform. Without active user base, Mirage will be like Sega Dreamcast?

          4. This is the frustration, they have the development talent and financial firepower to completely dominate the VR / AR space. We can see a glimpse of this with “Worldsense” positional tracking which is very performant on limited mobile SOC. We can see their production capabilities with Google branded hardware like Smart speakers, Pixel phones and Daydream headsets.

            People may not realise how advanced Google’s machine learning and artificial intelligence actually is; their purchase of UK based company “Deepmind” some years back massively ramped up their advantage.

            Come on Google….we are waiting 😉

      2. Yeah, makes sense to say that HTC is safe because of China, more specifically because of the government funding. Anyway, don’t know what would happen if Oculus will came to China in the near future… I know that US companies are having some troubles recently for entering Chinese market and VC (Meta’s CEO knows what I’m saying), but I also remember Oculus trying to push off this barrier some time ago. Can’t rememebr neither when nor how, but even Carmack was studying the Chinese market if my memory serves me well, and I think it wasn’t in his free time.

        About the compatibility, you are right. I’ve finished watching the second part of the opening keynote and in fact Barra confirmed exactly what you said. Will be (it is, already, according to what he said!) just a matter of a click to deploy a Quest application to the Rift, either for Unity or Unreal. So, great!

        1. Carmack can study what he wants, but if the Chinese govt wants to block Oculus, it can. The best scenario is that Oculus partners again with Xiaomi and sells a clone in China… but in that case, the mission of Facebook to spread its social network with the VR devices would have no sense. It is all a matter of politics, China VS USA is the new technological cold war.

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