Best Oculus Quest Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals & Sales 2020:

With its new fully autonomous and wireless headset, Oculus aims for an affordable. But uncompromising virtual reality experience, providing immersion worthy of PC headsets. What if this is the future of VR?

Presentation

The Oculus Quest is the first fully autonomous virtual reality gaming headset offered by Oculus. Perfectly self-sufficient, requiring no PC, console or smartphone to operate. It still promises to give access to real experiences in ” roomscale “, with free movement in a delimited space of up to 5 x 5 m. It differs in this from the Oculus Go. The very first autonomous helmet from Oculus, which only allowed for the rotation of the head and not movement.

The Quest is also supplied as standard with Oculus Touch controllers, with functionality identical to that of the Rift. Making it possible to simulate the presence of hands in virtual space. Unlike this time the Lenovo Mirage Solo , another headset from RV authorizing movement. But content with a simple remote control as a controller.

The bowels of the Oculus Quest are inhabited by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chipset, known to have been the SoC of choice for many high-end smartphones of 2017. The headset is offered at launch in two versions, one carrying 64. GB of storage and sold at an indicative price of €. 449, the other amount at 128 GB and € 549.

Best Oculus Quest Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals & Sales 2020

1. Oculus Quest All-in-one VR Gaming Headset – 64GB (UK Import)

2. Oculus Quest All-in-one VR Gaming Headset – 64GB

3. Oculus Quest All-in-one VR Gaming Headset – 128GB

4. Oculus Quest All-in-one VR Gaming Headset – 128GB (UK Import)

5. Oculus Quest All-in-one VR Gaming Headset – 64GB (Renewed)

Ergonomics

In general terms, the design of the Oculus Quest does not present any great originality. Since it only takes up the design principles of the original Rift . This particularly concerns its semi-rigid headband attachment system, which presses the visor against the user’s face, just like the manufacturer’s first helmet did.

The effectiveness of this system is no longer to prove. Even if, here, the comfort can suffer slightly from the small weight gain of the Quest compared to the Rift. While the second weighed “only” 470 g on the scale, the weight of the newborn, with its on-board battery and electronics, goes up to 570 g. 

These additional 100 g, without being intolerable, sometimes tend to tilt the helmet a little more forward, and make it fall on the nose. To avoid this, it is important to adjust the size of the straps perfectly. So that the headband fits snugly under the base of the skull at the back of the head. That the upper strap distributes as much as possible. weight of the assembly on the head. It takes a little training, but after a few days of

In the end, for most body types, the comfort is good enough to consider keeping the Quest on your head for several hours. The foam covering the outline of the visor is pleasant to the touch and breathable enough not to allow too much heat to accumulate inside the helmet. It can be very easily detached and replaced in the event of wear.

Image quality

The Oculus Quest has two OLED screens with a PenTile structure, each displaying a generous definition of 1,440 x 1,600 px – equivalent to that of HTC Vive Pro , and clearly above 1,080 x 1,200 px per Rift eye . This definition is spread over a field of vision roughly equivalent to that of the Rift, i.e. 110 ° (a little more or a little less depending on whether you have a flat face or not, or whether or not you need to use the separator for glasses).

As always, the PenTile structure – with its two sub-pixels per pixel only, instead of three sub-pixels per pixel for an RGB structure – causes a small granularity of the image, which the eye perceives as a slight effect of grid once these pixels are magnified to the extreme by the visor lenses. However, the excellent quality optics used on the Quest produce a softening of the perceived image, which significantly reduces the problem. Without being eradicated, the grid effect is thus much less visible on the Quest than it is on the HTC Vive Pro, for example, while the two headsets nevertheless use identical slabs. Likewise, although the Quest still uses Fresnel lenses, it suffers much less than the average of the usually visible halo light effects, especially when displaying bright objects on a dark background. Finally, there is no problem of chromatic aberration.

The configuration of the optics of the Oculus Quest is unfortunately incompatible with our colorimetric measurement probes. We cannot therefore offer you an objective analysis of the fidelity of its display. With the naked eye, however, we did not detect any notable color drift when displaying images or videos. 

Audio

The Quest does not have built-in earphones or headsets. Instead, it takes up the concept introduced with the Oculus Go. Directional speakers are integrated into the branches of the headband and project the sound waves towards the ears of the user. It is easy to understand that this solution was chosen for its extremely practical side. It makes it possible to ensure that as soon as you wear the headphones, you have sound in all circumstances.

However, it obviously does not work miracles when it comes to perceived sound quality. It should be considered as a backup solution. The speakers installed here are certainly significantly more efficient than those of the Go, producing a little more bass and power. But the sound provided remains very narrow, and above all unconvincing in its spatialization since it gives in a way the impression of a sound scene remaining confined inside our skull, rather than spreading all around us . For the natural, we will iron.

The solution to this is obvious: connect a good headset or good headphones to one of the two mini-jack outputs on the headset. Excellent news, unlike the Go, the Quest headphone outputs provide a signal of excellent quality, clear and powerful, and also benefiting from excellent current handling. It is quite possible to connect a monitoring or hi-fi headset not too greedy. Thus to make the most of the binaural sound environments of games.

User experience

Oculus’ intention with the Quest is crystal clear: to make virtual reality as accessible and easy to use as possible. Not only by eliminating the need to associate the headset with a P. C or console, but also by tweaking and simplifying to the extreme the user experience. Let’s be clear: success is total, and that’s where the real magic of the Quest is found.

When unpacking, the Oculus Quest first invites you to configure the headset via the Oculus mobile application, available on iOS and Android. After the inevitable initial firmware update  comes the time to put the device on the head: immediately, the helmet then goes into ” pass through ” mode , allowing you to see through the helmet, thanks to the cameras , your outside environment. You are then simply asked to draw, with one of the two joysticks, the free play area in which you will be able to move. Once done, you are already transported to the Oculus Home interface, from which you can launch your applications.

In other words, in a few tens of seconds at most, you are already ready to embark on real experiences in ” roomscale “Suppose you bring your helmet to a friend and set up a play area for them; when you return home, the helmet will not ask you to recalibrate it in your usual room.

Note that for these roomscale experiments , the Quest requires at least an area of ​​1.5 x 1.5 m, and recommends at least 2 x 2 m. If you do not have this space, rest assured: the vast majority of applications and games can also be used in “stationary” mode, sitting or standing, and only demands you to clear around you a circle of one meter of diameter.

CONCLUSION

With its first real autonomous and wireless gaming headset, Oculus seems to have found the magic formula of virtual reality. Comfortable, wonderfully simple to use and offering total freedom of movement. The Quest gets rid very advantageously of all the complexity that still pleases headphones for console and PC today. It makes VR more enjoyable and accessible than ever. The experiences it can run certainly do not reach the sophistication of which these platforms are capable. But that does not prevent the. Quest from offering from its launch an impressive number of essential games (Beat Saber, Moss, Superhot. VR, Robo Recall, Thumper …), which make him a providential gateway to the wonderful world of virtual reality.

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