Oculus Quest: First Impressions
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYxrJ2L8Xl4&w=560&h=315]
A few months ago I picked up my first VR console in the Oculus Quest. I was trying to jump into a newer trend of gaming. The Oculus Rift has been around since 2012 as a kickstarter, started by Rift. It would later be bought by Facebook and have a full release four years later in 2016. The Oculus Quest was released earlier this year, and i was a massive hit.
Hardware
The Quest is not a very hard system to pick up and play. There are also no cords involved whatsoever with the consoles. The main components of this system is obviously the headset and the two Oculus Touch controllers.
The headset is easily adjustable to your head. The headset doesn’t really affect anyone with glasses, at least from my experience. The lens in the headset also use “next generation” lens technology which puts emphasis on less prominent graphics. It also has Oculus Insight, which are four small cameras on the headset which track your movements as opposed to placing several cameras around your room. There are also built in speakers, which are extremely convenient when playing games.
Oculus Insight also has affected the Touch controllers. The ring that has typically been placed on the back of the controller, is now placed on the front of the controller to help with tracking.
Software
The Quest offers an interesting array of software for itself. With Pass-Through, the headset allows the player to see through it when not in the play zone. It gives a grainy, black and white view to alone the person to walk around or find their way back to play.
In a software update in November, Oculus released the Oculus Link. This would allow one to hard wire the Oculus Quest to a PC to play games from the Steam Store.
Setup
The initial setup for the console takes roughly 15 minutes, most of which is typing in your password for your WiFi. You also must download the Oculus App onto your phone. With that all done, you set up your gaming perimeters. You look around your room and manually draw the gaming area. Once that’s done, you’re basically ready to play.
Games
After setting up the console, the Quest has a very slim gaming catalog. As of writing this, there are roughly fifty games in its catalog. Which that being said, you do have the ability to download more games from the Steam Store with the Oculus Link. There are way more than enough demos for you to try out basically all of the games.
There are games such as First Steps and Oculus First Contact which are designed to get you familiar with the mechanics of VR. Along with those, there are a ton of games and VR experiences that are free and I would recommend checking them out.
Overall if you have the extra money, I’d recommend picking this up. The Quest has a price tag of $399.99 for the 64GB memory or $499.99 for the 128GB memory. Its more affordable than the Oculus Rift and has most if not all of the capabilities of it.