No Go: Why VR Hardware Shouldn’t Strive For “Good Enough”
Does the $200 standalone headset (that still requires a smartphone) showcase a lightweight next-gen immersive experience?
TL;DR: No. I keep going back to the Rift and Vive for immersive design review. Although Oculus Go could still be a fit for quickly viewing spherical images.
Stereo rendering and 360° viewing are pillars of immersive computing, but they don’t deliver a compelling VR experience in isolation. When I lose myself in VR, the hardware is quickly forgotten. In order to surrender my consciousness to the digital realm, I need the interface to feel unconstrained (freedom), feel satisfying to use (joy), and strategically break the rules of physics to accomplish tasks with ease (magic).
The Go is easy and lightweight, but it doesn’t deliver immersion.
The Oculus Go blocks our natural body movement by only tracking head rotation (3DOF) and not translational movement. Short battery life and mobile computing power means that experiences will be bite-sized, and the pointer restricts interface options. These limitations produce something closer to a View-Master 2.0 than the next-gen VR device that the AEC industry is hoping for.
The Go sits in an awkward middle ground between portable lightweight XR and high-end tethered XR. Sure, I could take the Go on the road, but there are so few scenarios where I’d be comfortable visually isolating myself. This means that I’m mostly using the Go in my office or at home, but in both those scenarios it’s just as easy for me to run a cable to my home theater or PC and gain all the benefits of additional compute power and tracking.
Portable immersion should be left to the AR market, which will do it better.
If the Go is trying to be portable it would be much better positioned as an AR device that tracks the outside world. Lenovo’s Mirage Solo, with inside-out tracking for 6DOF movement, is closer to what I had wanted from the Go. It might not offer joy or much magic yet (the Daydream app ecosystem leaves a lot to be desired), but boy does it deliver freedom.
As HoloLens / Magic Leap hardware improves we’ll have more precedents that illustrate what an immersive, portable experience looks like, but for the time being I keep going back to the Rift and Vive for my departures from reality. Yes, they require a powerful PC, calibration, and some strategic positioning of cables, but they offer hints of VR’s immense power to influence our emotions— imbuing a sense of wonder in a 40-foot atrium or a sense of refuge from a lowered ceiling.
The Go has potential as a 360° panorama viewer.
Since the Oculus DK1 in 2013, VR has been able to deliver a true sense of scale. 1:1 experience laid the foundation for our work at IrisVR, and we’ve seen the industry grow from these early prototypes. We built Prospect to facilitate immersive design reviews and coordination on the Vive, Rift, and various Windows MR devices, while Scope has been designed to offer easy 360° panorama viewing on mobile headsets.
Although I tend to wax poetic on room scale experiences, we’ve seen value in 360° stereo panos for quick viewings of single points in space. Oculus Go, like the GearVR and Daydeam before it, could be a fit for these spherical experiences in the short term as tethered headsets continue the march towards true immersion.
I’m increasingly excited about the future of VR.
Room scale VR is starting to prove its ability to deliver freedom, joy, and magic. It’s easy to rag on the shortsightedness of Oculus Go, so I wanted to end with a few highlights of VR tech coming soon.
1. Hand tracking for VR
A future that is controller-less with interfaces that are finger based? Based on Leap Motion’s work, I think so! https://www.leapmotion.com/product/vr/
2. Web-based VR
Mozilla and Google have done groundbreaking work getting browser-based VR up and running, which could solve many of our compute and interoperability challenges in a few years. https://mixedreality.mozilla.org/
3. VR that better simulates how our eyes work
Alongside the Go release, Facebook announced work on a “Half Dome” prototype that would offer a much larger field of view and an overhaul on the way the lenses work. This would provide a much more accurate image in VR and is an exciting step towards true immersion that feels natural. https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/02/oculus-prototype-headset-half-dome/
What do you think?
As these technologies battle for the fabled “consumer adoption inflection point”, I’m interested to hear more from our users and from the XR community regarding the Go. Did you take the dive and purchase a Go? How has your experience been so far?
