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This is a great price point and excellent feature set for mainstream VR. I have almost no interest in it, but would be comfortable recommending it to less tech
by xbkingx 8y ago
This is a great price point and excellent feature set for mainstream VR. I have almost no interest in it, but would be comfortable recommending it to less tech savvy friends and relatives.
Having a Vive and GearVR had taught me that I don't like the helplessness that comes from Oculus's mobile VR design philosophy. I like a little more control over my devices, but I totally see the appeal of an "It just works" setup.
The thing I am struggling with is how they will determine play space. Not the sensors, and cameras, etc. If I start a game in a large open room then later continue in a smaller space, how will the games handle that? Right now you can see that a game requires a certain amount of space for roomscale and games are generally divided into seated, standing, and roomscale options. Will devs be expected to support all modes and all reasonable levels of roomscale for every title, since the room layout can change at every launch?
I'm really looking forward to full 6DOF, untethered VR, but it seems like this might be a bit premature and better suited for AR (environment variation would be to AR as 6DOF tracking was for VR). It's a convenience feature before other unresolved and non-standardized core MR features, like eye tracking, balance, simulation sickness, full body tracking, etc. I'm very interested to see how they handle the inside out tracking, but I fully expect it to be a little watered down (but hopefully better that the Windows MR implementation, which isn't terrible).
The Quest seems like a marketing decision taking precedence over a raw technological development path, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing here. VR hype is waning in the public eye and this is a very noticeable improvement for average consumers. It may have been a smart decision that will keep the conversation going, and the investment dollars flowing to devs.
I do wonder why this wasn't introduced with a GearVR 2, though. Charge $200 for a pair of controllers and the headset and it's salt the same system. It makes me wonder if they found dealing with varied hardware and an OS not under their complete control too burdensome, or if they just didn't see the numbers they were expecting.