Custom PC – October 2019

ofthedisplays(atleastwhencomparedwiththeRift)

compensatesforthatlackofgraphicalprowess.TheQuest

is also the first VR headset with six degrees of freedom for

both head and hand tracking. Rather than using external

sensors, the Quest tracks motion through four on-board,

wide-angle cameras placed at each corner of the headset.

Setup

The Quest arrives in a small box containing the headset,

two redesigned Oculus Touch controllers, a USB-charging

cable and attachable plug, plus four AA batteries for

the Touch controllers, two of which are spares. The

Quest must be charged out of the box, although the

cable is long enough to enable use while charging.

Set up is performed mainly through the Oculus

smartphone app, which connects via Bluetooth. The

process takes you through system updates, pairing the

controllers, calibrating your floor height and drawing the

boundaries of your play space. The latter is achieved

by viewing your room through the headset cameras

and using the controllers to ‘paint’ the boundary.

You’ll be ready to play in around 20 minutes,

although you still need to download your games,

and you may have to wait closer to an hour if you

want a fully charged battery, Nonetheless, the lack

of external sensors makes it a pain-free process.

Wearing the device

The Quest is 100g heavier than the Rift, but that’s a small

increase given the additional hardware. Plus, unlike the Rift,

the Quest doesn’t have a heavy cable pulling down on the

left side of your head. The HMD’s frame system is similar

to that of the Rift. It distributes the weight across the

entire head and can be adjusted with Velcro straps

at the temples and crown.

REVIEWS / VR GAMING HEADSET

SUPPLIER oculus.com

OCULUS QUEST

/£399 inc VAT (64GB) /£499 inc VAT(128

VR GAMING HEADSET

V

irtual Reality represents

the pinnacle of full-

immersion gaming, but its

practicalities have stymied Neuromancer-

like fantasies of literally stepping into

Cyberspace. The necessity to plug yourheadsetintoa

powerful PC, and own large spare roomforregularVR

gaming, has limited its appeal. One solution is the Oculus

Quest, an entirely standalone headset that essentially

acts as a portable console you wear on your face.

There are no cables tethering you to your PC, no

external sensors to set up around your room. It’s the

closest VR has come to ‘pick-up-and-play’ yet – a

liberating and greatly improved experience that ,while

not quite revolutionary, demonstrates the future VR must

embrace if it’s to become a standard mode of play.

Specs

While the Quest’s design focus is usability, the headset

also provides greater visual clarity than the original Rift.

Chiefly, its OLED display panel operates at a resolution

of 1,440 x 1,600 per-eye, compared to the Rift’s 1,080

x 1,200 pixels per eye. The Quest has a slower refresh

rate, however, at 72Hz compared to the Rift’s 90Hz.

A Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip (SoC)

is built into the headset, incorporating four Kryo 280

Gold cores running at 2.45GHz, and four Kryo 280 Silver

cores running at 1.9GHz – both core types are based on

the ARM Cortex-A73 microarchitecture. The SoC also

includes an Adreno 540 GPU (Adreno is Qualcomm’s name

for the Imageon tech it bought from AMD) with a unified

shader architecture and 256 ALUs. Integrated speakers

also replace the Rift’s built-in, flip-down headphones.

There’s a 64GB version and a 128GB version, the

latter of which, at £500, costs £100 more than the

64GB. This isn’t much money, but as VR games tend

to be small, and you only need up to 12 games on the

system at any one time – the 64GB version is still fine.

Clearly, the Quest is less powerful than any headset

that connects directly to a PC, but the added visual quality

of the displays (at least when compared with the Rift)

8 GB)

adset into a

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