You are going to be able to drink a beer in VR with Oculus Quest (eventually). Your Oculus Quest will be able to track a beer bottle and your furniture, it can turn a real beer bottle into a virtual beer bottle, in exactly the same place as a real beer bottle.
So you can walk around your house in a virtual world, the furniture is replaced with rocks, or other things, the fridge is a mountain that you can open and inside you can see your virtual beer, and when you drink it you will be drinking a real beer.
In this article I share Oculus Quest Software Impressions, talk about Multiplayer Features, and what you may not know about Oculus Quest.
First of all Quest is an XR headset, meaning that it does Augmented Reality in addition to Virtual Reality. Unlike the Oculus Go it has 6dof tracking for both your motion controllers and your head, this means that you your handmovement is tracked in space so if you move the controller forward in the real world you see your digital hands moveforward.
The good news is that some titles look like Oculus Rift apps, the bad news is that some titles look like Gear VR apps. VR titles “Super Hot” and “Dead & Buried” look so good they are almost indistinguishable from their Oculus Rift counterparts. It feels like you are in an Oculus Rift, except that there is no cord and you can move around in a much larger space. In theory there doesn’t have to be any size limit to your VR space, and at Oculus Connect 5 the largest demo area was 4000 square feet.
The 50+ titles expected to ship with Quest in the Spring of 2019 are expected to all be Virtual Reality titles, but this machine is capable of Augmented Reality applications as well. There weren’t any Augmented Reality apps demoed at OC5 because the AR features are still being developed but they are coming.
When the AR features are finished users will be able to scan their homes or offices and the device can re-skin those items to look like virtual objects, such as so you could have a virtual red couch in the exact same position as a real world grey couch, and then when you reach out with your hands you will feel a real couch, it will look red, but you can sit on it.
Someone I was talking to last night at OC5 joked that you will be able to drink a beer in VR, but that’s actually true, your device will be able to identify a beer bottle, replace it with a digital beer bottle, and you can see it, pick it up, drink it, and put it down again without ever leaving your VR experience.
Quest also has a pass through video feature, so you can see reality if you want to while you are in the headset. By accident I was able to see the pass through feature on the Oculus Quest. Pass through enables you to see the real world through the front facing cameras on the Oculus Quest.
Interestingly the Oculus Quest is powered by a Samsung Snapdragon 835 Chipset, the same chipset found in its stand alone competitors, that means in theory that all these devices should be capable of creating experiences that look very close to desktop VR experiences.
The very bad news is that once you try an Oculus Quest it will be difficult to go back to desktop VR. I really don’t see a future for desktop VR, because even if you have a wireless adapter that adapter is going to have a certain range of effectiveness, whereas with the Oculus Quest you could roam through different rooms and its build in Guardian system can maintain an accurage up to date map of your house, if someone moves the couch it notices the new position of the couch, and it can update your guardian system.
Some people have compared the tracking on Oculus Quest to the tracking on Microsoft Mixed Reality (that’s a negative comparison) but my feeling is that the tracking is better than both Microsoft Mixed Reality tracking and also Oculus Rift tracking, however in 1 of the 6 demos that I have had in the Oculus Quest the tracking was shaky and we had to reset the device, after the reset the Oculus the tracking was perfect. One thing that’s bad about the Microsoft tracking is that it easily loses track of where your hands are, but the Oculus Quest does a much better job with its 4 strategically positioned cameras that can track a 280 degree field of position around you so that actually it tracks much better than Microsoft MR headset and I think it feels better and more accurate than Oculus Rift tracking to me.
The great news for Oculus Quest is that you can see other players in VR in the same play space as yourself. You can run around in a very large play space and see the positions of other players represented as Virtual Avatars. is that being free of the cord to run in a 4000 sq ft space where you can see the positions of other players, and their position in space is correct, if you peak under the headset they are standing in VR exactly where they are standing in reality, so this will make multiplayer VR experiences in the same spaces possible, you don’t have to worry about accidentally colliding with another person.
