News Oculus Rift S revealed with inside-out tracking

A bet eh in most respects, but I'll reserve judgement on perceptual clarity until I've had a chance to try one. While the spec-sheet panel resolution looks like a minimal change, you have a combination of improved fill-factor, imrpoved optics, and RGB-stripe vs. RGBG pentile (meaning subpixels per-eye is double that of CV1). As every HMD release thus far should have demonstrated, raw panel resolution is far from the arbiter of visual quality. While self-contained tracking would make this ideal for portable use (and backtops, if you like that sort of thing), I can see personally the lack of physical lens shifting and the 'headstrap' audio being rather annoying.

I might be tempted to pick one up anyway for non-VR use if the Insight camera streams can be accessed raw: a calibrated and characterised array of cameras (in a known fixed relationship) for £400? That's perfect for offline photogrammetry, and it might even be possible to use the lower-quality online SLAM that's been demonstrated at the same time (so you could plug into a backtop, walk around a large space and see a preview of the capture inside the HMD from person-height, then offload the captured images for processing to produce a model).

 

Glad I grabbed my Samsung Odyssey + with its 1440x1600 per eye OLEDS.


Though what I am interested in is the New HP Reverb with it's 2160x2160 per eye. That will be a game changer.

 

The Reverb looks to have some nice panels, but is shackled with pretty bad tracking (HP have directly stated that tracking performance is identical to their previous HMD). The optics are also 'remains to be seen', and that is something much harder to get right than just slapping some lenses in front of a panel and guesstimating the pre-warp compensation. If you just want to use it for slower-paced flight sims and 'desktop replacement' then it's probably a pretty good option though.
The downside is that until OpenXR is adopted across the industry as standard, you also get stuck with the teetering stack of Windows Holographic atop of SteamVR, which is just not a fun time to poke at and hope it works properly every time you want to use it.