Hands On with the Oculus Standalone Headset and Touch Controllers

To many, virtual reality (VR) represents the future—of computing, social interaction, gaming, and entertainment. But to industry insiders, the main question is non how VR volition shape the future, but how to transform VR.

Facebook-owned Oculus has come up up with curt-term and long-term answers to that question. The long-term answer is peradventure the most intriguing: a very rudimentary prototype of a standalone VR headset, code named Santa Cruz. Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, touted information technology tardily last week as a sort of VR Goldilocks: it combines the best of the Oculus Rift (immersive VR experiences that harness a loftier-end PC processor and external sensors) with the freedom of the Samsung Gear VR, one of the amend examples of a headset not tied down to wires.

Oculus Standalone Headset

As a concept, the prototype is fairly simple. Engineers took a Rift, added iv cameras to the front and a CPU, graphics carte, cooling fan, and battery to the back. There's nil polished nigh information technology. The fan is relatively noisy, the logic lath is exposed, and the bombardment dangled from the bottom of the headband.

Once I put it on, though, none of that mattered. The sensation of being completely untethered is something I'd never experienced in VR before, not because I'd never used a smartphone-based headset similar the Gear VR, only because this fourth dimension I didn't have to lower my expectations near the video and tracking quality.

I walked right up to the chaperones—the blueish barriers that appear when you're nearly to run into the walls of the physical room you're in—with no pesky existent-globe wires to become in the mode. Meanwhile, the brandish never stuttered or demonstrated tracking lag, something that occasionally happens with the Samsung Gear VR.

The only drawback that I noticed during the demo had been how information technology appeared to be enervating very little of the Santa Cruz's onboard processor. Cars, buildings, and other elements looked similar polygons, and there isn't much motion in the scenes. An Oculus engineer wouldn't say whether or not Santa Cruz could run a more than demanding demo without its functioning suffering, only he did acknowledge that components are Santa Cruz's main limitation.

Intel and Qualcomm are working on their own standalone VR headsets, and so Oculus isn't alone in its pursuit of an untethered VR time to come. As Santa Cruz shows, that futurity is promising, simply it'south held hostage by the limitations of fitting powerful components into a headset-mountable enclosure.

Oculus Touch Controllers

Oculus's more than firsthand answer to the VR future question, though, is coming in December: the highly anticipated Touch controllers, which I got to examination out with a few of the more than 30 games and other apps that volition take advantage of them by next year.

PCMag tried the Touch controllers before, when they were on display at CES 2022. Not much has changed since and then, except that many more than developers now support them.

I found the virtually useful aspects of the controllers to be teleportation and grabbing objects, which are both a bit awkward to do with a conventional controller. In Killing Floor (trailer below), a mail service-apocalyptic first-person shooter, I used the joystick on the left controller to teleport. It is a slightly cumbersome ii-pace process, but it affords a lot of freedom. Yous can await around by moving the joystick through 360 degrees commencement, and then releasing it wherever you want to finish up.

While zombies are approaching, though, there is a lot to remember, and I sometimes dropped my weapon (which I held using the middle finger button) while I had been looking for a spot to teleport to.

The Touch controller contributes to the realism of the VR experience. I got used to information technology subsequently nearly an hour, and felt almost helpless during my concluding demo, a controller-less Karaoke game for the Samsung Gear VR.

The controller is available for pre-order now at US$199, and ships in December. Check dorsum soon for PCMag's full review.