Oculus Quest was the main attraction at Oculus Connect 5 this week. Following the high-end standalone headset's reveal, attendees of the conference got to try several demos to experience the headset's inside-out positional head & hand tracking, including in an 'arena-scale' setting. We also got a handful of interesting details about the headset's specs and capabilities. Oculus Quest (formerly Project Santa Cruz) is officially set to launch in Spring 2019, priced at $400. While that's twice the cost of the company's lower-end Go headset, it could certainly be worth it for the much more immersive class of games that comes with positional tracking (which the Go lacks). But that will only be true if the inside-out tracking tech, which Oculus calls 'Insight', can really deliver. Quest 'Insight' Tracking [caption id="attachment_81813" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] Insight seems to be shaping up to be the best inside-out head and hand-tracking that I've seen to date. I say "seems" because I haven't had a chance to test the headset's tracking in a non-demo environment. The tracking system relies on recognizing features of the surrounding environment to determine the headset's position in space; if you played in an empty room with shiny, perfectly lit white walls, it probably wouldn't work at all since there wouldn't be sufficient feature density for Insight to know what's going on. Demo environments are often set up as best-case scenarios, and for all I know something in my house (or anyone's house) could really throw the system off. Oculus claims they're tuning the headset's tracking to be robust in a wide range of scenarios, and as long as that remains consistently true, Insight will impress many. While other inside-out tracking systems either lack positional controller tracking entirely, or require some compromise on the size of the controller tracking volume, Quest's four cameras, mounted on the corners of the headset, cover an impressively wide range that I effectively couldn't defeat. A simple test I'll often do with such systems is to move my outstretched arm as far outside of my own field of view as possible, then move it while (hoping to have lost the view of the tracking cameras), then bring it back into the tracking volume from some other angle. Generally I'm trying to see my hand 'pop' into existence at that new point of entry, as the cameras pick it up and realize it wasn't where they saw it last. Despite my efforts, I couldn't manage to make this happen. By the time my hand came anywhere near my own field of view, the hand was already re-acquired and placed properly (if it had even left the tracking volume at all). I would need to design a special test (using something like a positional audio source emitted from my virtual hand) to find out if I was even able to get my hand outside of the tracking volume, short of putting it directly behind my head or back. So that means there's vanishingly few situations where tracking is going to harm your gameplay, even in situations that would normally be cited as problematic for inside-out tracking systems, like throwing a frisbee or hip-firing a gun. Two specific scenarios that I haven't had a chance to test just yet (but believe will be important to do so) is shooting a bow or aiming down sights with a two-handed weapon. In both scenarios, one of your hands typically ends up directly in front of, or next to your face/headset, which could be a challenging situation for the tracking system. I'll certainly test those situations next time I have Quest on my head. In any case, it feels like Oculus has done a very good job with Quest and its insight tracking system. Assuming Quest can achieve a consistently high level of robustness once as it finds itself across a huge variety of rooms and lighting situations, I think the vast majority of players wouldn't be able to reliably tell the difference between Quest's inside-out tracking and Rift's outside-in tracking in a blind test. And that has big benefits beyond just getting rid of the external trackers. For one, it means the device has 360 roomscale tracking by default rather than this being dependent on how many sensors a Rift user chooses to buy and how they decide to set them up. Additionally, it means players can easily play in much larger spaces than what was previously possible with the Rift. At Connect I played a few demos with Quest, one of which was Superhot VR. The game was demoed in a larger-than-roomscale space (about the size of a large two car garage) and I was free to walk wherever I wanted within that area. When it came to hand-tracking, I played the game exactly like I've played it on the Rift many times before, without noticing any issues. Being used to tethered headsets, it was also incredibly freeing to take a few steps in one direction and not see a Guardian/Chaperone boundary, then simply keep walking for many more steps before needing to think about the outside world. Oculus took this to the extreme at Connect in an experiment they put together to show how Quest tech is capable of 'arena-scale' tracking. They created a large arena space, about the size of a tennis court, and put six players wearing Quests inside to play a special version of Dead and Buried. Physical cover (boxes of varying sizes and shapes) covered the area, and players could physically walk anywhere around the arena and use the cover while shooting at the other team. [caption id="attachment_81840" align="aligncenter" width="640"] A rendering of the arena set up at Oculus Connect for 'Dead and Buried Arena'. I added a little red stick-person for scale. | Image courtesy Oculuis[/caption] Through my time in this demo I didn't see any jumping in the positional head tracking, even while I walked 10 to 15 feet at a time from one piece of cover to the next. So, Quest is shaping up to deliver the same kind of quality positional tracking experience that most of us associate with high-end tethered headsets today, but now with more freedom and greater convenience. That's a big deal at a $400 all-in price point. Continue on Page 2: Oculus Quest Tech Details » Oculus Quest Tech Details [caption id="attachment_81815" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] Today we also learned from Oculus today about what makes the headset tick. The 1,600 × 1,440 per-eye displays are OLED with a PenTile sub-pixel layout, Oculus confirmed to Road to VR, which brings many of the same upsides and downsides that you'd expect from the Rift's displays. For instance, OLED gives rich colors and deep blacks, but you'll see ghosting in high-contrast scenes. The Quest displays is definitely sharper than the Rift with less screen door effect, and looks an awful lot like the Vive Pro display, with similarly solid mura correction. I haven't had a chance to check the headsets side by side, but my guess is that Quest is probably using the same Samsung-made displays as the Vive Pro. Oculus tells Road to VR that Quest's displays and system are locked to 72Hz, unlike Oculus Go which is usually 60Hz but with an optional 72Hz mode for developers who can hit that target. A faster refresh rate means smoother visuals, lower headtracking latency, and less visible strobing, though it comes up short of the 90Hz standard of headsets like Rift and Vive. Oculus also confirmed that Quest will have the same hardware-level chromatic aberration correction that was announced for Go, which prevents color separation at the edges of the lens. As the headset uses the same lenses and lens clips as Go, compatible prescription lenses will work for both headsets. This makes sense especially as Quest's lenses are identical to Go. That means similar pros and cons: a reasonably large 'sweet spot', but also god rays in high contrast scenes. However, unlike Go, Quest has an IPD adjustment, which means you can match the width between the lenses to the width between your eyes. That allows you to dial in the sweet spot more precisely on Quest. Presently the headset doesn't show an IPD figure as you move the slider, and we aren't clear if that feature (as seen with the Rift) is in the headset or not. When it comes to the Quest controllers, they're slightly less ergonomic than the Rift's Touch controllers in my opinion, as they have a somewhat straighter handle, and (and this is really subtle) are actually missing that nice little thumb rest that that's on Touch (I didn't know I used it that much until it went missing!). Still, they are effectively the same tool as Touch, offering all the same buttons and a very comparable form-factor. [caption id="attachment_81814" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Photo by Road to VR[/caption] Oculus also confirmed to Road to VR that while the demo units at Connect weren't showing it, all of the same buttons on Rift's Touch will also be capacitive on Quest's controllers. That means that the buttons can sense when your finger is resting on them (even if you aren't pressing them), which allows your virtual hand to react more closely to your real hand movements. Quest's $400 price point is for a 64GB model, and while Oculus tells us that they aren't yet sure what other capacities they will offer, they are considering additional options. As for weight, Oculus says Quest's weight isn't locked in just yet, but presently it's about 100 grams heavier than the Rift, which would put it around 570 grams. The company told us they were proud of that weight considering everything inside—and they probably ought to be—however it does feel noticeably more front-heavy to me than the Rift. [irp posts="81785" name="'Robo Recall', 'The Climb', 'Moss', and More Coming to Oculus Quest"] The on-board battery certainly contributes to that weight, and though the headset is running the more powerful Snapdragon 835, and has to power four on-board cameras, Oculus says they're targeting similar battery life as Oculus Go. That could well mean that they had to stick a bigger battery in the headset. When it comes to the Guardian system, we wrote here about how the tracking system is capable of arena-scale tracking and multi-room Guardian—according to Oculus—but the company is still working out the exact setup flow for the Guardian system on Quest. On Rift, users just walk around the outside of their playspace with their controller to trace an outline which serves as a boundary. With Quest though, you can imagine this is more difficult because you have to be wearing the headset to track the controller in the first place, which would obscure the view of the world you are trying to trace. One (seemingly) obvious solution would be to enable a pass-through video mode so that the user could see outside of their headset as they trace their space. And although Oculus has demonstrated pass-through functionality for Quest, they wouldn't commit to whether or not pass-through would be a user-accessible feature, nor if it would be used to assist with Guardian setup. Given that it's possible to look through Quests cameras at all raises some significant privacy questions. When we pressed Oculus on this they claimed privacy was high on their list of priorities. Indeed, at least one smart choice seems to support that claim: a white LED on the front of the headset is connected directly to the same power rail as the headset's four on-board cameras. Oculus says it would be impossible for the cameras to be turned on without the LED being turned on as well, unless the headset was physically altered. The company also told us that all of the positional tracking is done locally and that the data used for that purpose isn't transmitted, however they do collect anonymized dimensions of players' play spaces for reporting to developers. Of course, nothing would prevent Oculus from deciding to collect and transmit more data from the headsets cameras at a later point. [irp posts="77163" name="Oculus' Privacy Architects Discuss Their Open-ended Privacy Policy & Biometric Data"] As for the cameras themselves, Oculus wouldn't specify if they were sensitive to IR or visible light (or both). However the company did tell us that Quest requires a certain minimum light level in order to function correctly, and they compared it to 'enough light that you could read a book.' Additionally, it was said that Quest's tracking isn't designed for outdoor use. - - — - - That's all for now. If you have specific questions I didn't cover, drop a line in the comments below! And be sure to stay tuned for more Oculus Connect 5 coverage.