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Facebook Technology

Oculus Quest 2 Offers a More Powerful Standalone VR Headset For $299 (androidauthority.com) 65

Facebook has unveiled the Oculus Quest 2, including its release date and price, and it promises to be a big leap over the original. Android Authority reports: The second-generation standalone, Android-powered virtual reality headset will be available on October 13 starting at $299 for a model with 64GB of storage, a full $100 below the price of the first Quest. Pre-orders are open now. The Oculus Quest 2 is much more powerful than its predecessor, with a Snapdragon XR2 chip and 6GB of RAM instead of the aging Snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM. That should lead to more advanced games and an overall smoother VR experience, although you'll need to wait for titles that take full advantage of the added power.

You may notice the improved display technology right away, however. The Quest 2 boasts the company's sharpest visuals yet, with a single LCD screen providing 1,832 x 1,920 resolution for each eye -- 50% more pixels than the 1,400 x 1,600 displays in the first Quest. It's the highest-resolution Oculus headset to date. The Oculus Quest 2 also supports much more natural-feeling 90Hz refresh rates, although it won't be available upon release. You'll have to settle for 72Hz at first. It could also be the most comfortable. The Quest 2 is both smaller and 10% lighter than before, with a soft head strap that should make for an easier fit. The Touch controllers are improved, too, with upgraded haptic feedback, better hand tracking, and a thumb rest. Add-ons will help, for that matter. A Fit Pack will adapt to different-sized heads, while a $49 Elite Strap and a $129 Elite Strap with Battery Pack offer both more comfort and longer VR sessions.

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Oculus Quest 2 Offers a More Powerful Standalone VR Headset For $299

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  • by bignetbuy ( 1105123 ) <dm AT area2408 DOT com> on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @08:28PM (#60513436) Journal

    It can be the best damned VR gear in the world but it still requires a Facebook login which makes it a non-starter for a LOT of people.

    • Why not just make a fake Facebook account?
      • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @08:46PM (#60513510)

        Facebook has vetting for accounts,and it WILL start to associate that fake account with your relatives and friends. Try it and see what I'm talking about, it's creepy.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Dracolytch ( 714699 )

          I've had no problem making fake Facebook accounts. Do it in incognito mode, and you're fine.

          • by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @10:20PM (#60513804)

            "Incognito mode" will not help at all. It is enough that someone on your network - that is, one of your relatives, your phones, your email or chat client - is connected at the same time, your new super-sikrit account will be associated with them immediately.

          • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @10:43PM (#60513872)

            nope, not fine, the temporary cookies from other sites you're on in Incognito can be used to nail you, as can your IP address and HSTS weaknesses. Then facebook contacts friends and relatives to ask if it's you.

          • by PingSpike ( 947548 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @06:23AM (#60514760)

            Every time I've tried to create a fake account recently it has locked and demanded a mobile number shortly after the account has been created.

            Once I tried to login to my legit account (which was always intentionally pretty sparse on personal info but none of it was false) and it demanded a scan of my drivers license. That wasn't a new account.

            So adding those two events up you never know when "your" Occulus Quest will suddenly ask for a scan of your drivers license to allow you to use it.

          • Or not... From the article:

            Quite frankly, I had designs on testing Oculus Quest 2 with a burner Facebook account. I'd set one up years ago with a spam email address, and Facebook's reps asked me for my Facebook account address before they shipped me the review unit. I gave them my burner profile URL, then went to reset the password. By wrongly typing my new password one time, I was locked out. "Please send us proof of your identity," the site sternly warned me.

            I actually went to an Ars Technica colleague and asked how he felt about mocking up a "frequent shopper card" with my burner account's fake name on it. He declined. He said something about "ethics." Fair enough. I had to shift gears and give Facebook a real-name account to use Quest 2.

            I mention this goofy anecdote because you may be tempted to do the same thing... but Facebook is both incredibly firm and incredibly arbitrary about leveraging the "real name" policy in its ToS. This service has waited to wipe hundreds of thousands of fake accounts, created by governments and political campaigns for illegitimate purposes, until after a PR nightmare emerges. The same service can flag the slightest weirdness in your attempts to connect real Oculus Store purchases with an account by the name of Guy Incognito.

          • I've had no problem making fake Facebook accounts. Do it in incognito mode, and you're fine.

            FYI, those accounts you made are definitely associated with you. Google and Facebook have moved away from identifying you with cookies which is basically all Incognito-mode is going to help you with. (And now they're working on restricting cookies to crush the smaller competitors.) There are unique identifiers on your devices (thanks Apple and Google), added to the headers on your network requests (thanks ATT, Verizon and ISPs) and techniques like browser fingerprinting to identify you.

      • by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        Because it is against their terms of service (real name policy in particular). It means they can ban you, and you may lose access to the games you purchased.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @08:43PM (#60513498)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • by stikves ( 127823 )

        My soul for $299?

        What an interesting dilemma.

      • by Drishmung ( 458368 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @09:41PM (#60513722)
        Actually, that's not the only reason he sums up as "Verdict: Avoid."

        He also hates the strap, the controllers and the way you adjust the lenses.

        • He also hates the strap, the controllers and the way you adjust the lenses.

          I would not say he hated the controllers, just they were a bit heavier and he found they tracked a little more poorly than the old controllers. But since as he said the LED could is actually the same, I think that's probably just a software issue that will be resolved.

          The strap is easily solved by buying the Elite strap for a bit extra, which is better than the old strap (which he said in the review).

          And I agree with him about the l

      • Errr no. That was one gripe the Ars Technica reviewer had. They don't recommend the headset because ultimately they had a shitton of gripes with it. Heavier controllers with less grip, less accurate, IPD slider not adjustable, 72Hz display with some vague promise of a future update, uncomfortable headstrap design (which is an achievement since the Quest was known for being uncomfortable before, but now it's even worse), less battery life, cheaper feel...

        The list just seemed never ending. The Facebook requir

      • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

        I have a Facebook account I use now and then, but I'm still not comfortable tying it to a gaming system.

    • Ars didn't like it very much, and agrees with you. [arstechnica.com]

      VR is as dead as 3D TVs anyway. They need to get the porn producers on board.

      • I read through the whole review carefully, and the device comes off better than it first seems...

        He complained about the new controllers not having the same accuracy - but it seems like it has the same number of IR emitters so that could be just a early unit issue?

        He complains about the refresh rate but that will also go up.

        He complains that you need to buy the Elite strap because the default is unusable - but the Elite strap actually is better than the Quest 1 strap (if it fits you).

        He also complains about

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • didn't understand the concerns expressed about it. Nobody wants to have their personal intimate details vacuumed up by Facebook.

            I understand the concern expressed, just saying it does not apply to me.

            I truly don't care what "personal intimate details" Facebook might gather while I'm playing Vader Immortal.

            You undoubtedly registered with Facebook because you wanted to use it as a communications tool.

            Only kind of, I hardly ever read or use it. I have it more because sometimes it's useful to have a Facebook

    • by slayin ( 7251290 )
      Me included. I am glad that I started purchasing games from steam and stopped buying from the oculus store for my rift. No way I would ever purchase another item from them after the facebook required shenanigans.
    • My experience with the Oculus Go is that the device always insists on you sharing all the stuff you may be doing on the device to your "friends" and other people on the "network". I wonder why do we are always pressured to share whatever it is that we do with other people? Are we really that special or interesting? Do those "friends" care? What is the big idea behind this?
      • Two things spring to mind:
        Advertising - the more often your "friends" see that someone they "know" has an Oculus, he more likely they are to want one themselves.
        Back-(side-?)door to invasive surveillance - the Quest and Go are wide-angle audio-video surveillance devices in your home, completely under Facebook's control, but that surveillance is only valuable when they know exactly who is using it. Also the more data you voluntarily share, the less likely you are to notice how

      • Are we really that special or interesting? Do those "friends" care? What is the big idea behind this?

        It's the industrialization of word-of-mouth advertising. When you give Facebook or any social media company permission to speak on your behalf, don't be surprised when you're suddenly talking about their products a lot. =)

    • Yep. I use Facebook multiple times per day but I still wouldn't buy this garbage. Who do they think they are?

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Wednesday September 16, 2020 @08:40PM (#60513490)

    Wow, a powerful standalone VR headset for 299$USD? Tell me more!

    Facebook has unveiled the Oculus Quest 2...

    Never mind.

    • Please apply a bit more thought to it than just being a Facebook hater. If you actually tried the headset you'd likely find that it also feels cheap, has an uncomfortable strap, crap IPD adjustment, poor controller tracking, and worse battery life than the previous generation. ;-)

      • That's kind of my point, though. I will never try it because I don't have nor will I ever create a Facebook account. So even if it were any good for the price, it doesn't matter.

    • Agreed. I really want a standalone VR system like the Quest - but I refuse to allow an audio-video surveillance device into my home under the total control of a company that's shown time and again that they have absolutely no respect for privacy, and no compunction against abusing the information they gather in any number of deeply unethical ways.

  • Nowhere near enough resolution, but I pre-ordered one anyway just so that jerks online would stop telling me "you havent tried it so you can't complain about resolution". Even though I have tried literally every VR headset and the resolution sucks, illegally blind fools will still tell me that VR looks a lot better than it appears.

    VR headsets, cumulatively, have STILL not sold as many units as the crappy Sega Saturn game console did back in the 90's. The Saturn was considered a major flop for Sega and nearl

    • And audio must ONLY be listened to at 192Khz sampling 24 bit uncompressed, anything else is simply unacceptable!
      Also, only eat food from Michelin starred restaurants (and dont even CONSIDER cooking for yourself!).

      Meanwhile, people in the real world are playing games on their phones while enjoying music via bluetooth and eating burgers..
      Damn them! Don't they realize they are ruining it for the rest of us?!?

    • What do you expect for $299? Look at the Pimax 8KX, it's 4k per eye but $1300.
    • Are you stupid? I'm genuinely asking here, this is a completely stand-alone headset not tethered to a PC or some whiz bang RTX3090. As it is the hardware is completely incapable of doing anything useful with that resolution.

      Even though I have tried literally every VR headset

      So tell us about the 8K headsets you've tried. They exist. I bet you haven't.

      VR headsets, cumulatively, have STILL not sold as many units as the crappy Sega Saturn game console did back in the 90's.

      What's your point? That a niche product isn't a massive consumer seller? I'm shocked! SHOCKED I SAY!
      Mind you you're also wrong. The Sega Saturn shipped 17million units over its life. VR headsets beat that mark h

      • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        Are you stupid? I'm genuinely asking here, this is a completely stand-alone headset not tethered to a PC or some whiz bang RTX3090. As it is the hardware is completely incapable of doing anything useful with that resolution.

        This headset is replacing both their standalone and tethered PC headset. It's intended to be used for both, with PC VR being handled via the Oculus Link feature. There were hardware limitations on the previous headset that impacted the quality of that experience, but the Quest 2 will be able to push significantly higher video bandwidth down the cable, and at a higher refresh rate.

        tl;dr: you can tether the headset to the whiz bang RTX3090 if you want to.

    • Spoken like somebody who never used a VGA monitor. Much less EGA or CGA. How could people stand to work on a computer where the text was only a blocky 8-pixels tall, much less game on a screen that was so much uglier than available in any video arcade?

    • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

      It's got more than twice as many subpixels as the previous Quest, and side-by-side comparisons show a massive improvement in detail/sharpness. It's got ~1.5x as many subpixels as the Valve Index or Vive Pro or Vive Cosmos Elite, which cost three to four times as much. Despite the fact that it costs only three hundred bucks, it's higher resolution than all other mainstream headsets except the HP Reverb G2, which has 32% more pixels for double the cost. The resolution of the Quest 2 is great.

  • Maybe they just were not available, but currently you can only order the 64GB model. That sounds a bit slim, but I guess VR games would tele to be a bit smaller and shorter, so probably enough?

  • They could give this thing away for FREE and I still wouldn't touch it because of Facebook.

    They could even PAY ME and I still wouldn't touch it because of Facebook.

    Occulus committed suicide the moment Facebook bought it.

    • Do you recall the leveraged valuation FB risked to SnowCrash the world? Because I breathed a sigh of relief with that deal...but the sigh became holding my breath beyond FB's tenth year in operation and the bruxism FB gave and gives me now continues unabated. Gate's turn as King David was bad enough, but a potential, litigious McDonald's owner and graduate of the Ruling Class' Polytechnic's "turn" is why Stephenson's work phased from practical to fantastic.

      Which sucks.
  • There is the tiny little detail that you will have to join the Facebook ecosystem in order to use the device, so that all your life are belong to us.

  • As long as they are connected to Facebook(both in the business and technical sense), I'd be happier with the dollar.

  • The Quest has a USB-C to connect to a PC so you can play VR games on a PC - great! Except the video has to be compressed to send over USB-C and the headset has to play tricks to compensate for the lag.

    Why didn't they have put a mini display port socket on their headset next to the USB-C? The display port would handle proper video out while the USB-C would do audio and motion. Such a relatively minor change would have unified their product lineup so gamers are not forced to choose between a tethered option

    • You can have displayport over USB-C, not sure if this will help with the lag though.

      https://www.displayport.org/di... [displayport.org]

      • by DrXym ( 126579 )
        In the Quest 1 they use software called Oculus Link that effectively compresses the game video from the PC, sends it as H264 over the USB-C and then hardware in the headset recomposites it on the other side. And of course audio, motion & controls are other channels. The issue would be things like resolution, compression artifacts & latency. So the headset & software play various tricks with motion prediction to try and shift the video around to hide lag but it's still there.

        Of course all this

        • Yeah, it looks like you can use the same old cable, so that sucks.

          I agree, HDMI or displayport would have been best

          Will have to reconsider buying the quest, but I can't really see any alternatives at the moment at this price point

        • Quest Link isn't doing any extra latency reduction/motion prediction tricks than your typical PCVR headset. If the VR system told the game "the player's head is here" by the time it finishes rendering that frame the player's head will have moved. Then factor in the additional time between rendering that frame and actually emitting the photons from the display what the person in VR ends up seeing would be very wrong.

          Instead the VR system tell the game to render the player camera from the position where it pr

  • It could make me morning toast but it will dead on launch if Facebook requires a Facebook account to use it in the future. Thankfully there are rumors that FB may not be able to do this (at least in a few countries) that have laws on the books forbidding "bundling" services that are not directly related to each other.
  • Karen Brace (Natalie Wood): Nobody is going to put a thing like that on their head. It's gotta be pared down to the absolute essentials. Just enough to house the sensors. You know, it can't look intimidating.
    Michael Brace(Christopher Walken): What do I care what it looks like.
    M.Brace punches at keyboard, takes light pen to tablet and uses CAD.]
    Brace:Put a chip here, another here; here. An armband spread across. That's all there is to it; Just Do It.
    /subliminal reference to Nike Inc./
    Lillian Reynolds (L
  • by Lady Galadriel ( 4942909 ) on Thursday September 17, 2020 @09:46AM (#60515432)
    I am not a user of The Facebook, The Twitter or such sociopathic sites, so the Oculus Quest 2, (with it's inherent requirement for The Facebook account), is a non-starter for me. But, an interesting question comes to mind.

    Can the hardware be re-purposed for a different VR infrastructure?
    Hopefully open sourced?

    That might make the cheap price a selling point. With perhaps 80-90% of the people accepting The Facebook account requirement, and the remaining people using the hardware for something else, it will sell well enough to remain in-expensive.
    • A quick search says that sideloading apps is an option (i.e.: pirating games), but not rooting or custom ROMs. That's typical for game consoles, I wouldn't expect any more than that.
    • While it's way more open than your traditional game console it's still not like a PC where you can choose your own OS. It's an Android device so until it's rooted you are locked into the vendor version of the OS which restricts what you can do with the hardware and software.

      That means you need a Facebook account to do anything and you can only install applications from the official Oculus Store. However, anybody with a Facebook account is currently allowed to request "developer mode" access which lets you i

  • Ars technica gave it a VERY bad review:

    https://arstechnica.com/gaming... [arstechnica.com]

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