Back in May, my colleague Daniel Terdiman reviewed the $199 Oculus Go—the first Oculus virtual reality headset that didn’t require a smartphone or PR as its brains—and called its release a watershed moment for VR. Now Oculus has unveiled Oculus Quest, a $399 headset it plans to ship next spring. At Facebook’s Oculus Connect developer conference here in San Jose, Mark Zuckerberg kicked off the keynote and called Quest “the all-in-one VR experience we’ve been waiting for.”
Oculus Go hit its affordable price by including only a single basic handheld controller and skipping the sensors required to sense your movements in physical space. Those limitations aren’t a major issue if you’re doing something like watching a 360-degree video, but they don’t permit more fully interactive experiences such as fancy games. Oculus Quest has the same display system as Go, but like the high-end, PC-powered Oculus Rift headset, it offers two full-featured Touch controllers—one for each hand. Courtesy of wide-angle sensors built into the headset, it also offers “six degrees of freedom,” allowing you to stand up and move around virtual space.
Getting to that future might take a while: Zuckerberg began his presentation by cheerfully noting that Oculus isn’t even 1% to his goal of a billion VR users worldwide.