News Oculus Quest standalone VR headset announced

Cheaper than I was expecting based on the Oculus Go pricing, for a much more complex device (dual rather than single panels, higher resolution panels, 4 half-decent cameras, beefier SoC to drive it, plus two much improved controllers). Guess they're hoping for pretty high sales volumes, which may not be unjustified with current PC component pricing.

The multiplayer Augmented Virtuality demo (real scene obstacles inserted into virtual environment) was also rather unexpected. That could eat the lunch of some of the event-space type startups (e.g. VOID): a self-contained HMD with no location setup (beyond a floor mat plus some flat-back objects) vs. needing to set up a calibrated external tracking rig plus deal with backtops to drive the HMDs. That's something you can drag out into a field with some inflatable cube/barrel obstacles and run out of the back of a van for the day.

 

I was hoping that they would of showcase the Half Dome prototype, as I think a lot of people are itching to get their hands on Gen 2 VR HMD.

 

Apparently, between eye-tracking being kinda difficult and the cellphone industry not pushing resolution increases on small displays like they wanted, they don't think gen2 will be for a few more years.

I am as disappointed as you. I'd like a Rift 2 with better optics, better resolution, and the corrective lens support they told me Rift 1 would have.

 

Remember Abrash's predictions are for state-of-the-art, not state-of-release. The question is whether Half Dome will be polished to a consumer device ahead-of-schedule as a "Rift 1.5" (sans foveated rendering), or if it will be skipped over and a more advanced "Rift 2" (with functional foveated rendering) will replace it a year later. Which will occur probably depends on how rapidly Turing (and Ampere, along with Navi that everyone damn well hopes AMD have actually added the low-latency pathways needed for VR in) are taken up to accelerate rapid changes in shading density, and whether similar "fundamentally the same but with Moar Res" HMDs from other vendors are rapidly adopted or fizzle. If the GPU backing is there and the tradeoffs of high-res devices are accepted by consumers, I can see Half Dome morphing into an interim product and pushing back a "Rift 2" an extra year or two. Otherwise, it'll probably be skipped.