- When I reviewed Facebook's Oculus Rift in 2016,
I thought it might be the start of something huge.
But VR hasn't blown up the way a lot of fans hoped.
SuperData estimated that around 354,000 Rifts shipped
in 2018 and around 4.2 million headsets shipped
across all the major brands.
For contrast, Sony alone shipped
more than 17 million PlayStation 4s that year.
VR had a long history in training, medicine, design,
and research before the Oculus Rift
and it's still big in those fields.
But home entertainment is another matter.
A lot of VR headsets are still expensive
or they're not very comfortable
or they're just sort of weird and isolating.
But Facebook, of course, thinks it has the answer
with the Oculus Quest, a completely standalone
VR system that doesn't need wires,
tracking cameras, or a separate computer
and can play full-fledged immersive games.
The Quest is basically Facebook's vision
of an ideal VR gaming console right now.
It solved some of the problems
that have kept VR on the margins,
but it's also a compromise.
(relaxed music)
The Oculus Quest's first big selling point
is something called the Insight system.
It uses four built-in cameras to track your head motion,
and a pair of hand controllers instead of making you
set up a whole VR room with mounted cameras.
But there's a new a Oculus Rift that uses Insight, too.
So the Quest's big unique selling point
is that it's self-contained.
The Quest isn't connected to a computer
and you can use it basically anywhere indoors,
as long as you're not completely in the dark.
Oculus thinks this makes a huge difference, and I agree.
I've been using VR for a long time
and I've gotten used to stepping around wires.
But not having to worry about tripping
while I'm jumping around a sports game
or pausing an adventure game to face the cameras
feels even better than I thought it would.
The battery lasts around two hours playing games nonstop,
which is longer than most of my VR sessions.
Oculus already has an all-in-one headset
called the Oculus Go.
But it doesn't have the Quest's sophisticated tracking
and it's meant more for watching movies in VR,
which people keep telling me they like,
but I still just can't get into.
The Quest supports some of the best games
for just moving your body, like the rock climbing game,
The Climb; the awesome rhythm game, Beat Saber,
which is like Dance Dance Revolution with lightsabers;
and a new VR version of the Kinect game, Dance Central.
There were a lot of questions
about whether the Quest's tracking and latency
would work as well as the Rift.
After all, you need to keep your controllers
in view of the Quest's wide-angle cameras
and you don't have a powerful gaming PC to run the games.
But my experience has been good so far.
The Quest has been responsive and precise enough
to play a fast-moving game like Beat Saber.
My controllers have occasionally lost tracking for a moment,
but that also happened with the Rift's old external cameras.
A lot of companies have either released
or announced self-contained headsets.
But in our experience, they're rough around the edges.
They're mostly geared toward businesses
where people don't always need to have fun using them.
If you are using VR for fun, you want a seamless experience
and that's what Oculus is trying to deliver here.
It's simplified things that used to be annoying.
You can just draw a line to set up
virtual boundaries, for instance,
instead of physically walking around the room.
Like the Oculus Go, once the setup's done,
you can pretty much just pick it up and start playing.
But unfortunately, the Quest still has some problems
that basically no VR company has cracked.
The screen is higher-resolution than the Rift,
but it's still a little grainy.
There's a whole computer and four cameras in the headset,
so it weights substantially more than the Rift.
If I don't adjust it just right,
my head starts hurting very quickly.
And look, I've used VR a lot, but I still feel silly
and socially awkward wearing the Quest.
Oculus has tried to make the experience
more natural by adding a casting feature,
so people can see what you're seeing
through a Chromecast or NVIDIA Shield.
That doesn't change the fact that you're jumping around
a room with something strapped to your face
so you can't see other people.
I'm not sure anything can change that.
And it's still a legitimate barrier.
Another problem is that Oculus is owned by Facebook,
which is constantly accused of invading users' privacy.
Oculus says it's got a strong privacy policy,
but VR is, by definition, tracking your every move.
And people might be rightfully hesitant
to give that data up.
Maybe it doesn't matter if the content's good enough.
The Quest is launching with about 50 titles
and it's bringing over some of the Rift's greatest hits.
But it doesn't include some of the Rift's biggest,
most gorgeous upcoming games.
It's still got the computing power of a mobile headset
and if you want to guarantee that you'll get all the latest
and best VR experiences, it still seems like
the Rift is your only option.
Oculus seems to be betting that a lot of people
will be happy with a convenient, lower-powered headset
that plays a smaller number of smaller games.
That's a bet that, honestly, very few
companies are making right now.
HTC and Microsoft are mostly focused
on selling to businesses, and Google hasn't said much
about its Daydream platform lately.
Nintendo just released a very cool
VR headset kit for the Switch,
but it's more of a clever toy than a whole new platform.
Sony is the one company that's making
the same play as Oculus.
It's pushed out a lot of games for the PlayStation VR,
which isn't the most powerful tethered headset,
but is the most successful.
It sold more than 4 million units since 2016.
Oculus could tap into that market
with something that's even more convenient.
And at $399, the Quest doesn't cost
too much more than the PlayStation VR.
I like using the Quest.
And I think it's a good compromise headset for people
who want several of the best VR games on the market
that aren't worried about missing some titles.
But I'm not sure it's overcome
some of VR's basic clunkiness and social awkwardness,
and that makes it hard to see
as the next big gaming platform.
So what's the non-VR game that you really,
really want to play in VR?
For me, it's the fighting game, Zeno Clash,
because that game's incredibly weird
and I love punching things in VR.
But let me know what you think.