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$399 Oculus Quest Offers Premium Standalone VR
SAN JOSE — Are you ready for a quest? Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sure hopes you are. Just 10 minutes into the Oculus Connect 5 keynote, Zuckerberg announced Oculus Quest, a new standalone headset from Oculus.
Scheduled to ship next spring for $399, the headset is the company's first standalone headset to launch with Oculus Rift-level graphics. With this annoucement, Zuckerberg declared the end of Oculus' first-generation of VR headsets.
Typical of most Oculus headsets, Quest looks pretty slick. The standalone headset will feature that all-important six-degrees of freedom, which is vital for allowing wearers to move in a 360-degree space. Speaking of 360 degrees, Quest will feature 360-degree audio, which Zuckerberg promised will be better than Go.
Similar to the Rift, Quest will also ship with a pair of hand controllers, which if they're anything like the Touch Controllers, will greatly enhance the immersion experience. The use of the touch interface should make it easier for Oculus developers to bring their games to the new headset, and Zuckerberg promised that 50 games and apps will be available when Quest arrives in the spring.
And Oculus isn't just settling for virtual reality, we also learned about the company's early build of mixed reality. We saw a crude early demo where notifications and social interaction played out on the Quest.
I'm just hoping that at least half of the promised content will be original content instead of ports. Stay tuned for our hands-on demo write up later today.
