Hidden Menu on Oculus Go provides Clues about Santa Cruz Headset

Due to a hiccup on the Oculus Go, users were able to view an Internal Settings Menu that might be providing clues about the upcoming Santa Cruz headset. Other than a few brief demonstrations, little has been revealed about Oculus’s upcoming flagship standalone headset. So what did we learn today?

Santa Cruz might be powered by Android

Oculus Go user thibe5 was playing around with the settings of his Oculus Go after a recent update. He found that if he clicked the settings gear in the bottom right corner of his home menu, he could access an Internal Settings screen on his Oculus Go. He shared this information on Reddit, and other users quickly confirmed that they could access this menu as well.

For the most part, there isn’t much to see here. However, we can see two options that reference 6DOF on the top row. This settings is quite interesting because the only existing Oculus Headset that supports 6DOF is the Oculus Rift. However, the upcoming Oculus Santa Cruz headset is going to support 6DOF as well.

6DOF?

For those that aren’t familiar, 6DOF stands for Six Degrees of Freedom. It’s the holy grail of VR control. It basically means that you can move your VR Controller in any direction and have that action reflected on the headset. The Oculus Go and Gear VR both only support 3DOF (Three Degrees of Freedom). For these headsets, you can move anywhere on a 2D plane, but can’t move forwards or backwards. So there is no depth to your movement.

What does this all mean?

Finding a reference to 6DOF on the Oculus Go is a bit puzzling. The headset itself has no way of handling 6DOF, so there is no reason for this option to be displayed on its menu. That is unless the OS itself is meant to be used on more than just the Gear VR and Oculus Go.

OculusOS on the Gear VR and Oculus Go is a customized fork of Android 7. It’s been completely modeled for VR, but is running Android at it’s core. This allows developers to easily port content from normal Android to Oculus hardware. Seeing 6DOF referenced in the Oculus Go’s Android-based menu strongly suggests that the Santa Cruz will be running the same OS. Which means that it will also be based on Android.

Some users have suggested this possibility in the past, but there hasn’t been any form of confirmation until now.

What we know about Santa Cruz

Santa Cruz is Oculus’s next step in standalone VR. They are building on what they started with the Oculus Go, but are reportedly delivering a more complete experience. The Santa Cruz will ship with dual 6DOF controllers, and will be more powerful than the Oculus Go. The team at Oculus have worked hard to create some impressive VR controllers for the Santa Cruz.

Their goal is to deliver experiences that have thus far been restricted to the tethered Oculus Rift. As great as the Rift is, being trapped next to your PC is restricting. The cost of owning a VR-ready PC is also a burden. Santa Cruz is their answer to these challenges.

What about Game Streaming?

Flickstiq is all about Video Game Streaming and Cloud Gaming. So you might be asking yourself what all of this has to do with streaming Games (which is a fair question). We’ve recently showcased some VR Game Streaming experiences on the Oculus Go. With a bit of tweaking, it can be used for PC VR and Cloud Gaming.

Now that we know that the Santa Cruz is likely running the same Android OS as the Go, it’s reasonable to assume that it should be able to deliver some of the same experiences. The big difference being that the Santa Cruz will support the same type of hardware that is already used for PC VR Gaming. It should be a much more capable Game Streaming headset than the Go. So that’s an exciting possibility to think about.

There is still a lot that is unknown about the Santa Cruz. We don’t know when it will be released, and we still don’t know much about what types of Games it will support. It’s possible that Oculus will reveal more details before the end of 2018. Until then, we will need to continue to look for clues like those that we found today.

Originally published at Flickstiq.