there are two ways to join the one percent you can get a job that earns you
over 200 000 us dollars a year or you
can buy a vr pc gaming headset and until
recently those things probably went pretty well near hand in hand given the
high cost of entry for enthusiast grade vr
but not so anymore while at 400 the
oculus rift s is hardly an impulse purchase it improves upon its
predecessor in a number of key ways while costing less than any other
flagship vr headset did at its launch i
mean to put it in perspective 400 while still expensive is actually
cheaper than what htc is still asking
for the original vive so the entire founding oculus team may be
gone now but facebook is far from giving
up on its vision for vr so why don't we take it
for a test drive whoa someone tighten this like crazy
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you know it's a funny thing but i feel like the box is a big part of the sales
pitch for the rift s the packaging for this thing is quite literally
half the size of the package for the valve index which is full of lighthouse
sensors wires power adapters and even a
feline companion to walk you through the complicated setup process rift s on the
other hand i am wearing or holding
everything that was in there there's a vr headset with the
requisite tether cable and two controllers that go on your hands
and that's it you're off to the virtual world have a
beautiful time now the thing is i was initially dismissive of the rift s
because it was my belief that inside out
tracking was a dead end for room scale experiences
compared to the more traditional approach where the headset uses fixed
location external sensors or emitters to orient itself in 3d space and in
fairness to me that wasn't a totally radical assumption i mean for one thing
there's the obviously enormous technical hurdle of trying to have
one moving object orient itself within a
space while simultaneously tracking both
the position and orientation of not one
but two additional moving objects i mean holy cat balls right
and then for another there was the awful experience that i had with first
generation attempts at this technology from the couple of Windows mixed reality
headsets that i got hands on time with but
here we are and i am damn impressed
now it does seem to take a second or two to lock in the first time that i put it
on but once it does it is far
far better than i expected so oculus
built a system that they call oculus
insight that uses three simultaneous tracking methods
first is the accelerometer and gyroscope data from both the headset and the
controller wait why am i illustrating this
facebook made their own video ah there we go that's better
so this is great for quickly detecting changes in both position and orientation
but the thing is these types of sensors have a tendency to drift over time so
they need to be anchored in some way the second means of tracking comes from the
five cameras built into the rift s here here here here and here these scan
the room creating a 3d map based on easily identifiable landmarks like the
corner of a piece of furniture or a high contrast pattern on a rug that is what
keeps the other sensors from drifting but then
we also need to take care of the controllers well that's where the ir
emitters on the rings come in the same cameras that scan the room track these
up to 30 times per second ensuring that any weirdness from the onboard sensors
can be quickly corrected finally then there's an ai software
component that will make its best guess anytime the data looks suspect like for
example if a controller is momentarily
occluded by like say for example a piece of clothing
like this one that you can get on lttstore.com
ykk zipper of course none of that would matter if
the headset wasn't any good so
is it that's a bit complicated the specs are
about as mixed of a bag as i could possibly imagine the new generation
touch controllers are light and comfortable with double a batteries for
quick swapping the speakers are built in
actually to the headset right here and here and kind of suck
so i guess it's uh it's a good thing there's a three and a half millimeter
jack right here the halo style headband seems to have been pulled straight out
of the psvr designer sketchbook and it's got really nice cushions on it but one
thing that i found is that it's kind of uncomfortable to
to pull on unless you adjust it big
put it on and then adjust it back small like i like to leave mine pre-adjusted
but i can't really do that and because there's no angle adjustment here there's
no way to uh to like just flip up
the headset and go back to the real world for a little bit other than just
using the integrated cameras to look around though in oculus's defense that
is a much better experience than i've had on the htc vive as well as the valve
index now a big contributor to the improvement in
visual quality is the lenses they are just plain better than last generation
except for one small problem there's no slider down here to adjust
the interpupillary distance through hardware and oculus instead relies on a
software adjustment now it wasn't a problem for me and i
actually got excellent clarity out of this headset but given how much grousing
that i've seen about it online it definitely merits mentioning finally
there's the screen at 2560x144
and using an lcd rather than an OLED this thing not only lacks perfect blacks
in a way that was immediately noticeable it is much lower res than even the vive
pro which launched over two years ago now the good news here is that even
going back to the original rift i always found that thanks to oculus's careful
attention to optics and anti-aliasing the screen door effect is mitigated
more on their headsets than necessarily on their competitors so i've found that
they've been able to punch above the weight that their displays pure pixel
count would suggest so the image actually looks really sharp and it comes
with the added benefit of being easier for your pc to drive
but perhaps too easy let's uh
let's jump in here and i'll talk about my biggest complaint about the rift s
first some good stuff steamvr picked up my rift s without much hassle so i
didn't have to rebuy any games the controllers are super light which
allowed me to hit my all-time best in kda pop stars on my very first run
through which i thought was pretty sick and thanks to oculus's excellent
tracking tech i also had more luck with my wrist flicks in hollowball
but the entire experience was marred by
one big flaw i think i'm looking into the camera am i yes i am cool that's
awesome i had hoped that facebook would be able to work some kind of magic to
make an 80 hertz display seem better than it is
but it's just obviously a step in the wrong
direction one of my biggest criticisms of the vive pro was that it sold itself
as an upgrade to the original vive while
leaving the refresh rate at a mere 90 hertz so
clearly reducing it is gonna piss me off
now like any performance deficiency it's no big deal if you're just hanging out
in the menu system or enjoying your 120
inch computer monitor or playing trover saves the universe like a more
sightseeing type game but it's really noticeable during fast paced and intense
gaming moments for a while i actually thought that there was something wrong
with my dual 2080 ti gaming pc over
there because i i noticed these choppy animations when there were lots of
particle effects going on in beat saber and it turns out that it was nothing to
do with my graphics card performance and just everything to do with the 80 hertz
refresh rate of my display when i'm used to playing at
hertz on the valve index and there were a handful of other things
that annoyed me like the fact that you're watching this video right now and you still haven't
hit the subscribe button okay so the tether being off to the side rather than
right down the middle of my head it's not like it pulls me to one side of the room or
anything like that but it was something that i was constantly aware of which i
did find reduced immersion and i found that during very vigorous movements
like on the quest the battery covers on the remotes would sometimes slip off
while i was playing though not fall off entirely so it's more of a
distraction and less of a game breaking problem
and i don't want these criticisms to take away from my overall positive
feelings about the rift s because here's the thing as much as my living room does
finally look decent thanks to some cable management that i did
no amount of adhesive wire channels is going to make it simple to fire up a
vive or an index upstairs in the study
or pack it up and take it to a friend's house
the portability and simplicity here is a
big advantage for the rift s over any of
its competitors and its own predecessor
and the reliability of its inside out tracking has given me a new hope for
this technology for the future all i can hope for now is that facebook
is working on a true 2nd gen rift with the same tech that
they're not going to farm out to lenovo for the design because they're too busy
working on the quest which by the way i also recently reviewed and you should go
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um so i'm back now normally i don't put
content after the sponsor spot but i figured most people wouldn't care about
this because i'm kind of nitpicking and i but i really wanted to talk about it
i think choosing displayport for the rift s
rather than HDMI was sort of a rookie error don't worry david i'll come back
over there and i will explain why
now displayport is certainly a modern high performance and pc centric
connector so it kind of makes sense on paper to switch over to it
but there's a small problem the first generation of vr headsets from
both competitors like htc and oculus themselves used HDMI so this entire
vr ready ecosystem was actually built up
around hardware-like graphics cards that had extra HDMI ports on them
specifically for that secondary vr headset or even pcs that had front
mounted HDMI plugs on them making matters worse many perfectly vr capable
machines like the ASUS zenbook pro duo that i had actually intended to put
through its gaming paces with the rift s
have no way of plugging into this thing because they don't have a displayport
output now theoretically this is an easy
problem to solve facebook has an faq that says oh well you could just use a
usb type-c or an HDMI to displayport
adapter except for a couple small problems so
the Thunderbolt 3 hub that i tried one that had displayport wouldn't show up as
directly attached to the dedicated GPU
because of a limitation in the way that oculus software detects what it's
attached to not that it should care and problem number two there is no such
thing as an HDMI port to DisplayPort female
adapter because that's just not how it works
going the other way around is simple because there are standard
implementations to carry everything from dvi to HDMI to freaking vga over a
displayport output but there has basically been no reason
to do it the other way around until
this one device now so unless facebook plans to engineer
some kind of active adapter there is just no way to plug it in now
this whole situation would have made sense if the display
resolution and refresh rate had somehow justified the move to displayport but
it's dp 1.2 which happens to be spec for
nearly the exact same maximum bandwidth as HDMI 2.0 which has been shipping in
pcs for five years now so
that theory can quickly be discarded so
yeah i guess that's all i really have to say about that i guess we're doing the classic seinfeld double goodbye here so
i'll make a new conclusion while the rift s was largely a good
experience it's worth noting that my time spent with it made me
eager to fire up my index more than it made me crave more rift s
though with that said if i didn't already have an index because i had to
buy it in order to review it i know where my money all less than half as
much of it would go so you can take that however you will