Oculus GO — hands on
It has been quite a while since I posted my post about the announcement of Oculus GO, the new, standalone, cheap headset from Oculus. It has now been released, I have got hold of a set and I have made some first attempts at developing for it (or at least porting some of my projects to it). So I think it’s time to share some of my experiences.
A New, but Familiar Headset
The GO is quite a departure for Oculus: it is the first truly stand alone headset, you don’t need to connect it to a (powerful) computer and you don’t need to slot an (expensive) phone into it. You just turn it on and use it.
More importantly you pay $199 (or the equivalent in your country) and you get to use VR, you don’t need to upgrade to an extremely high spec PC or buy a new, high end (and extremely specific) phone. That is a big step to making VR accessible to everyone. While I’m much more likely than most to spend more of my salary than I should on VR equipment, as a long term iPhone user, I was long put off mobile VR by the need to get a high end Android phone (I’ve got nothing against Android, but I’m very used to my iPhone and use it constantly, so it would be a bit disruption to change phone). I think that opening mobile VR to iPhone users, will itself be a good thing.
Having said what an imporant inovation the Oculus GO is, in many ways it is very familiar. It is designed to be completely compatible with the GearVR, so there is a lot that isn’t new with the headset. The general UI and layout is familiar to any oculus users, with the nice “Home” environment and curved menus. More importantly, all games that run on GearVR will also run on Oculus GO, so you have a lot of content available to you on the Oculus Store, which is probably it’s biggest appeal over other stand alone headsets that will be coming soon.
It is still very impressive that Oculus have managed to get all the functionality of the GearVR, which relied on you having a $600 phone, into a package that costs only $199 (though I’m sure a bit of subsidy from their Facebook owners helped).
You Still Need a Phone
Having said that you don’t need a phone, the first thing the instructions tell you to do is reach for your phone. Luckily this isn’t to drive the graphics, but to do some basic set up. Rather than doing everything on the device itself, it asks you to download an app on your phone (and it can be an iPhone!) to do some basic set up, like connecting to WiFi. Though I’ve heard some criticism of this, it is an extremely sensible decision. Some things like text entry are pretty clunky in VR and I think entering a WiFI password work be a pretty painful experience, whereas on a phone it is fine. The phone also lets you browse and buy apps from the Oculus store, which is probably more comfortable than doing it in VR (again the thought of entering credit cards details in VR doesn’t sound great).
Using the GO
So what is the GO like to use? Pretty good actually. It doesn’t really compare to my experiences of the Rift, VIVE or Windows MR (which I’ll come to in a minute) but for mobile VR it is not bad.
The graphics are good. The “Home” experience is easy to use and even pleasant to hang around in. There are some good games (I was particularly looking forward to playing Land’s End by the fantastic ustwo), which are enjoyable to play. The browser is actually pretty easy to use and a good way to access 360 video on Youtube etc. 360 video is generally as good as it gets on the GO.
Oculus GO vs High End VR
So what are the drawbacks? Why am I not giving up on my Rift? The most obvious answer is that the graphics won’t be as good as you can get in a high-end system. This is true but you can create fantastic experiences without high end graphics (as Land’s End shows), and you don’t need great graphics for presence.
The real reason is that it does not support position tracking. It will track your head turning, but not it’s positions in space. That means that it will not give you such a strong place illusion and you can’t step into the VR world.
A related issue is that, though the GO has a dedicated controller, it’s position is not tracked either, so you can’t use your hands directly to interact with the world. It is a good pointing device, but it doesn’t feel like interacting with the real world.
The lack of position tracking also means that the GO is more likely to cause nausea than a high end system. I certainly noticed this, I’m actually quite sensitive to VR sickness, and tend to feel bad quite quickly when using the GO and have to stick to under 20 mins (no equivalents of my hour long BeatSaber sessions).
All these problems are common to all mobile VR headsets, so they aren’t a specific criticism of the GO, so don’t take these criticism as implying that the GearVR or Daydream are better (apart from the Lenovo Mirage that supports inside out tracking). What I am saying, is that you shouldn’t get an Oculus GO and think that you are getting the full VR experience.
Developing for the GO
Lot’s of people have reviewed the GO, so I expect the most important thing you might want to know about, is what is it like developing VR experiences on the GO. To be honest, it was quite painful to get started, with lots of installing and re-installing of things, but once it got working it was fine.
The first thing I noticed is that there is a lack of documentation or simple instruction on how to get started. It was quite hard to even get an answer to a basic question. Is it the same as developing for the Gear VR, or do you have to do anything different?
The good news, is, yes it is the same. You can pretty much follow the instructions for developing for Gear VR.
Just like Gear VR, the Oculus GO is an Android device, even if it doesn’t look much like a phone, essentially it is.
You need to install Android (which is quite painful) and build your Unity Project as Android. You need to plug your GO into your computer using a USB cable and hit “Build and Run”, your project should appear on your GO headset (after a very long time building).
The one thing that isn’t very obvious, is that, to run a unity project on an Androind phone you need to enable debugging on the phone. But how do you do that on the GO which doesn’t have the same settings menu as a phone? The answer is that you need to enable it in the setting in the phone app, not on the device itself.
Because setting the GO up for development is a bit fiddly and poorly documented, I have separated out the instructions into a separate post, as I think people will find it useful, so go here if you want to see it.
Once you are set up, development happens pretty much like any other Unity project, which is quite smoothly. I’m sure I will encounter some hitches as I devlelop more, but my projects ran fine.
Summing up
I agree with other commentators that say that the GO is a significant development for Oculus and VR in general. A cheap, stand alone headset is much more accessible to ordinary people than the move expensive hardware we have seen so far. Having said that, it isn’t a replacement for high-end VR, there is still a lot lacking, particuarly head movement tracking and 6 Degrees of Freedom Controllers, both of which are critical for the VR experience. Developing on the GO is fairly smooth (one you have set up Android), because it uses the same, well trodden, libraries that the GearVR uses. The compatibility is likely to also be an important benefit for consumers, because it already comes with one of the biggest libraries of apps and games for VR.
