Oculus' Santa Cruz standalone VR headset has been present at its Connect conference for the past couple of years, and the company has promised it was on the way soon. Now it's official.
Mark Zuckerberg announced at Oculus Connect 5 that its high-end standalone device is called Oculus Quest, and it will be available in Spring 2019 for $399. It will ship with 50 plus launch titles and Oculus Touch controllers.
Hands-on: Oculus Quest review
Zuckerberg outlined a couple things he believes are needed for a truly great VR experience. One would be a standalone headset with no wires, second would be hand presence and third would be 6DoF (degrees of freedom) for true movement.
The Quest, according to Zuckerberg, hits all three of these beats. The actual device comes with built-in audio, 6DoF and hand presence with the Touch controllers. It also has 64GB of storage and a display resolution of 1600 x 1440 per eye. And yes, there's lens-spacing adjustments. The built-in audio is improved from the Go, with deeper bass.
The Quest looks slightly different than the Santa Cruz, coming with a more curved design than either the Go or Rift. You'll also notice the four wide-angle sensors to look for edges, corners or other features in the environment.
Those sensors build a map, combine it with gyroscope data and guesses the location of your head every millisecond. Oculus calls this tech Insight, and it's testing it in hundreds of different home spaces so that it can detect as many floors and objects as possible. These sensors also allow Quest to go beyond roomscale, with Oculus saying it can go into a 4,000 square feet room.
Insight also supports multi-room guardian. So you can take it between your home, your office and your friend's home and it'll remember its guardian setup for each. The Oculus Touch controllers have also been slightly tweaked, and they are also compatible with Rift.
Zuckerberg says the Quest is the final piece of the product puzzle for Oculus. The Go is intended to make good VR affordable, the Quest provides a standalone experience with high-quality Rift-like experiences and the Rift can connect to a PC for the highest-end experiences possible.
Zuck also says that these three devices are also platforms, so anything built for them today will also work with new iterations in the future. Speaking of the future, Oculus also announced that the Quest is capable of mixed reality. It showed off a quick demo of someone using the device to view a digital version of their room and get Facebook Messenger notifications.
We're at Oculus Connect 5 and we'll be getting some hands on time with the Quest so stay tuned for our first impressions on the new Oculus headset.
How we test
By Husain Sumra
Husain joined Wareable in 2017 as a member of our San Fransisco based team. Husain is a movies expert, and runs his own blog, and contributes to MacRumors.
He has spent hours in the world of virtual reality, getting eyes on Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and Samsung Gear VR.
At Wareable, Husain's role is to investigate, report and write features and news about the wearable industry – from smartwatches and fitness trackers to health devices, virtual reality, augmented reality and more.
He writes buyers guides, how-to content, hardware reviews and more.