During today’s Oculus 5th annual conference Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to unveil the Oculus Quest.
What was previously called Project Santa Cruz, the Oculus Quest is their most powerful standalone VR headset to date.
Costing just $399, Oculus Quest is a marvel in VR technology. Featuring a wireless headset and two wireless controllers, the Oculus Quest promises to bring VR experiences to the mainstream. Thanks to a low price of entry, a powerful stand-alone, wireless headset, intuitive controllers and a battery life that will keep you entertained for hours.
Releasing in Spring 2019 the Oculus Quest will allow budding VR gamers to cut the wires, and more importantly, immerse themselves in a world without many limits, thanks to the Oculus Quest’s Oculus Insight technology.
With a few specially placed cameras around the headset, the Oculus Quest will not only know where your hands are, but it will also know if you are moving in space. Whether you’re dodging to the side to avoid an incoming fireball or crouching down to stroke a virtual puppy on the floor, all six degrees of your motion is tracked by the Oculus Quest headset alone.
In previous generations of VR hardware this required the use of placing fixed cameras within your gaming space, but with Oculus Quest’s built-in cameras tracking distance to objects around you, it allows you to remove the need of external cameras and give you a greater sense of freedom and moment in the virtual world you’re in.
Think of it as being in a bubble, whilst everything occurring within this bubble being monitored and tracked. The processing of this alone must be pretty resource hungry, but thanks to a powerful Snapdragon CPU with a built-in GPU the Oculus Quest will be able to process this and it’s applications simultaneously.
At the time of its announcement there was not many games shown to the developers and journalists who were invited to their annual event. Attendees were able to play Project Tennis Scramble in a real world scale environment, scream with fear in the sequel Face Your Fears 2, and the most interesting of all was playing in an 8 vs 8 team Deathmatch with other headset wearing folk in Dead & Buried Arena.
In Dead & Buried Arena players strapped on headsets, that were synced up to a virtual world, where players welded dual pistols in a small-sized battle arena. Hiding behind real life walled objects, players could navigate a real-sized world whilst inside the headset the same virtual world was playing out – lasers and all! It must have been a fantastic experience that’s best shown by watching this video.
Since it’s announcement we have heard that existing Oculus Rift titles Super Hot and Moss will be coming to the new Oculus Quest, and I am sure we will hear many more as we creep near to its Spring 2019 release date.
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