Oculus Go
Update: Oculus Go is no longer the sole standalone VR headset from Oculus. Oculus Quest will be launching some time in 2019, and boasts PC-quality virtual reality in an untethered headset. It's unlikely to kill off the more affordable Oculus Go just yet, but it's worth keeping an eye on, just in case.
Original review continues below...
Oculus Go is, in many ways, the dawn of a new era in virtual reality (VR). It’s a standalone device, meaning it’s finally cut the cord from the PC needed to run its older and more powerful brother, the Oculus Rift.
It’s also, of course, done away with the smartphone. You won’t be slotting anything into the Oculus Go except your face when you slip on the plush headset.
For Facebook, which owns Oculus, Oculus Go represents a brand-new way to experience VR. The company calls Oculus Go the most approachable VR product on the market, and it’s not wrong in that the headset lets you step into VR with little setup and no expensive PC requirements, all at a reasonable price.
What about Amazon Prime Day and Black Friday? If last year is anything to go by, expect to see some decent discounts this year on Oculus Go. We recommend keeping an eye out for deals during Amazon Prime Day, happening on October 13-14, and Black Friday, coming up on November 27, for the biggest savings.
As a piece of VR hardware, the experience on hand with Go is almost as good as the Oculus Rift. You won’t mistake one for the other, but we have been continually impressed with how good Go’s VR is, especially considering everything needed to run the headset is contained in a little gray box that sits on your face.
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Looking beyond the nuts and bolts of what you get in the Oculus Go package, this headset represents a turning point for VR.
This is VR for the casual gamer, the relaxed consumer of media, the person without the time, money or interest in setting up a PC to power a higher-end headset. This is VR for everyone.
Does this mean people will suddenly start buying Oculus Go in droves, frenzied because they can finally buy a headset anyone can use? No, not by a long shot.
But, the potential is there for word of mouth to spread, for individuals to try a Go on in a store (Best Buy in the US is setting up in-store Oculus Go demo stations) and think, ‘Yes, this is something I can get into’, for parents and peers to buy one as a gift for birthdays or Christmas for less than the price of other headsets.
No, the new VR revolution won’t happen overnight, but Oculus Go signals that it’s coming, and fast.
Price and release date
The Oculus Go price has been permanently reduced; the 32GB Oculus Go will now cost $149 in the US, a reduction of $50 from its original $199 / £199 / AU$299 launch price.
The 64GB model has also been reduced from $249 / £249 / AU$369 to $199 in the US, with both models to be given "comparable discounts in every country where the Go is available".
While prices in other territories are still to be confirmed by Facebook, it looks like UK buyers can get their hands on the 32GB Oculus Go for £139, and the the 64GB model for £189 from Amazon.
Design
As soon as you take Oculus Go out of the box, you feel like you’re holding a device that costs $199 / £199. Its design is sleek and has some nice subtle touches; the front panel is a slightly different shade of gray in certain lights, for example.
The straps are soft and adjustable, though it’s always a bit awkward adjusting and cinching down a VR headset by yourself when you’re wearing it.
And, though the headset feels secure on your head, we could feel it sliding up at times, causing us to push the headset back down or otherwise readjust it.
Once on, Oculus Go feels incredible on the face. The plush inner lining is soft and pillowy yet has an airiness to it as well. Oculus said it consulted with the garment industry in making the Go, and this is apparent in the headset’s premium comfort feel.
As for wearing the device, it’s important to point out two things. One is that a fair amount of light seeps through the bridge of the nose.
Some people are really bothered by light leakage in VR as it breaks the immersion. Other users are able to ignore it after awhile, or are otherwise not too perturbed by it.
We tended to oscillate between the two ends of the spectrum; at times the light seeping through was distracting, and at others we were so caught up in a game we forgot it was there.
It’s hard to say how individual users will respond to light leakage, but know that it is present in the Oculus Go.
The second point to note about wearing Oculus Go is that its weight distribution is very much in the front. It rests right on your upper cheekbones, and once you’ve worn it for awhile, an achiness starts to set in, like you’ve been holding a smile for too long.
We have yet to find a headset that has perfected weight distribution. Of the premium headsets on the market, the HTC Vive has done the best job, so far, in minimizing it.
Oculus Go, which, remember, houses everything you need to run VR right inside the box that sits on your face, may have a very forward weight-distribution, yet all-in-all it’s a comfortable headset that feels good to wear.
One neat trick Oculus Go pulls off is how it integrates audio. Instead of building in headphones, like the HTC Vive Pro, the Go’s plastic arms have slits that house the speakers, and this design feature helps the headset maintain its cohesive profile.
Oculus Go also includes a 3DoF controller. The controller feels good in the hand, and, in fact, we prefer it over the Google Daydream View and Samsung Gear VR controllers for its ergonomic design and responsive controls.
You won’t experience the same level of immersion with the Oculus Go controller as you will the Oculus Touch, the controllers that come with Oculus Rift, however.
With Touch, your hands are brought into VR, and the controllers track your hand as well as arm movements.
This isn’t the case with the Oculus Go controller; it’s not much more than a point-and-click remote, though it can move around in the virtual space, and it does so quite faithfully.
In an Oculus Go game called Coaster Combat, you use the controller like a pistol to shoot at and collect coins. The controller felt intuitive here, and we were quickly caught up in the task (helping us to forget the light leakage, for one thing).
It’s games like Coaster Combat where the Oculus Go controller shines because it goes beyond simply selecting things and becomes a part of the virtual world you’re seeing before your eyes.
Performance
The Oculus Go launches in a somewhat interesting climate for virtual reality, at least in terms of users’ expectations – with the medium still in its relative infancy, what should users expect from what’s being billed as a relatively affordable entry point to VR, especially if they’ve yet to try one of the pricey high-end headsets?
Because, despite its $199 / £199 price tag, the Oculus Go gives even the premium competition a run for its money.
While it may lack the dev studio clout of Sony’s headset, we were shocked to find that it offered a comparable experience to the PlayStation VR headset when the Go was pushed to its limits.
The Go in effect raises the stakes for all looking to develop VR hardware – as a standalone unit, it wipes the floor with the likes of Google Cardboard and even its own cousin (and also Oculus-developed) the Samsung Gear VR, while pushing what we should now come to expect for our money from the more expensive headsets, too.
Before talking up the surprisingly impressive performance aspects of the Oculus Go, however, it may be worth pointing out its most considerable limitation.
The Oculus Go makes use of an “Orientation Only” movement system – in other words, while you can turn your head and view a 360-degree world, and have your controller tracked within it, you can’t move through the virtual space.
If there’s something in the distance happening onscreen, physically walking towards it won’t bring it any closer, nor will leaning “into” the space ahead of you.
As such, it’s a bit more like being in a fighter pilot’s cockpit than, say, the freely-tracked movements of the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. It’s equally worth noting, though, that the Go is designed to be an entry point for the VR-curious and so, if they’ve never used a VR headset before, may not even realize the extra-dimensional element that is missing.
Once you’re in a game or VR experience, however, it’s hard to fault the Oculus Go. Tracking (within the realms of movement supported) is accurate and comfortable, with little jerkiness that could otherwise increase the chances of feeling unpleasant nausea.
The 5.5-inch, 538 ppi panel (with a resolution of 2560 x 1440) is impressive, too, sharp enough to almost eliminate the “screen-door” effect earlier headsets suffered from. Oculus told us it used a fast-switch LCD display with the Go to have better pixel fill, meaning the pixels are simply larger and thus reduce the screen-door effect as well.
The goggles in front of the screen too appear improved over those of the Oculus Rift, which suffered from more pronounced glare than is present when using the Go.
It was a little bit fiddly to install, but the included glasses spacer was a welcome accessory, giving this glasses-wearing review team a little more room to accommodate our specs for comfortable viewing.
Built into the strap mounts that sit either side of your head, the speakers on the Go prove remarkably useful, too.
While they’re no replacement for a high-quality pair of headphones, they’re a great idea – as they’re not going directly into your ears, you’re given a sense of the ambient space in the real world around you, making bumping into something or missing a doorbell less likely when using the Go, while also avoiding unnecessary dangling cabling around the headset.
They lack the depth of a pair of good in-ears, and using them around friends may cause annoyance due to the sound leakage, but it’s a comfortable, fuss-free way of jumping straight in with some audio.
Games and apps
Games and experiences on the Oculus Go are a varied bunch – there are over 1,000 apps, movies, games and short-form VR experiences at launch for the Go, being a mixture of brand-new titles and remixed Rift and Gear VR content.
Oculus has a relatively open submission system for apps, making the quality of each experience vary – but there’s already a lot of great stuff to play with, and we’d rather have the option of dipping our toes into less-polished titles than not at all.
Whether rattling along a cartoony roller coaster firing at targets in Coaster Combat, jumping onstage into the middle of a 360-degree concert in the MelodyVR app or settling down for a sedate game of super-popular board game Catan in VR, the Oculus Go rarely stuttered during play.
Load times could be a little longer than you’d like, but when it’s firing on all cylinders, titles like sci-fi stealth-em-up Republique and space shooter Anshar Online look impressive considering there’s no external processing occurring (the Go houses a Snapdragon 821 processor, the same one found in handsets like the LG G6).
But, perhaps the best example of Oculus’s ambition with the Go is the new Oculus Rooms app, coming to Oculus Go and Gear VR. This is a customisable social space in which you can hang out with pals floating around, playing chess, sharing photos and watching films.
The sense of spatial audio is excellent, and hanging out with a pal from the other side of the world to watch a movie is an impressive, Ready Player One-like experience.
Moving to the other side of the room and then seeing the screen in the corner of the virtual living room continuing to play Matt Damon’s The Martian in the background (in 3D, no less) showed just how flexible and powerful shared social spaces in VR could be.
It’s worth noting that while Oculus Rift games can’t port over to Oculus Go, and the idea is that developers who’ve already made apps and games for Gear VR should be able to easily build versions for Oculus Go.
But as a sort-of consolation prize, Oculus Go does support cross-platform play between itself and the Oculus Rift and Gear VR, so you can play along with friends who own either of these headsets while you’re wearing your Oculus Go.
Battery life
Battery life is a bit of a double-edged sword for the Oculus Go. You’ll get around 2 hours of gaming from a 3-ish hour charge, or about 2.5 hours of video according to Oculus’s claimed battery measurements, and that’s more or less in line with our experience.
You may, however, find those targets missed if you’re downloading lots of VR apps in the background while using the headset. Two hours of use against a three-hour charge may seem like a poor trade, and it’ll be especially noticeable if the headset is intended to be shared within a household.
However, you’re unlikely to want to spend that much time in a single undisturbed stretch inside a VR headset’s confines, so it’s hard to complain too much. Still, it’ll be a push to get through an entire movie in one sitting, which is unfortunate.
We also noticed a rare problem (which we failed to replicate after further testing) where the Oculus Go appeared to drop frames when approaching a depleted battery.
It’s worthy of the benefit of the doubt, but paired with the way some apps upon booting would very briefly flash the display white before settling, it suggests there’s still room for a little optimization here.
All in, though, it’s hard to argue with the performance of the Oculus Go. For a self-contained headset, not reliant on an external power source or processing unit, it delivers a fantastically diverse and approachable VR experience.
It’s no Vive Pro, but Oculus Go is the sort of device that would have seemed unfathomable just a few short years ago.
Verdict
Oculus Go does not disappoint. It offers excellent VR that, while not as good as what you’ll find on a PC-tethered headset, is still immersive and enjoyable.
Simply put, the whole Oculus Go package just works. From its design and content to the controller and visuals, it’s hard not to smile or, at times, simply be amazed when you’re using the headset.
It’s so good, you actually forget that it’s not tethered to anything and is running completely on its own.
Oculus Go is not a perfect device, but more often than not we were able to look past its flaws and truly enjoy ourselves. Oculus Go succeeds on many levels, and one area where it really excels is social VR.
When you’re in Oculus Rooms, “hanging out” with people half way across the world, there’s a sense that Oculus Go is being used for its intended purpose; what it was made to do. Social, of course, is what Facebook wants VR to be, and it has seemingly struck on the right formula with Oculus Go and Oculus Rooms.
Then, of course, there is the price. Oculus Go is not an inexpensive product; buying something for pure entertainment purposes for $199 / £199 may be a hard sell for some.
But, for what you get with Oculus Go, the price is hard to argue with. This is a premium product, and it feels like it from the moment you take it out of the box until the moment you remove it from your head after a session in VR.
Rather than having a bunch of competing headsets, Facebook views VR as sitting on a spectrum; those who want a high-end experience can opt for the more expensive Rift, while those who want something more casual or portable can go the ladder to Oculus Go and Gear VR.
Oculus Go is more than just a happy middle ground, however. As we’ve said, it represents a new era for VR, one that’s fun, deceptively powerful and much more accessible than anything that’s come before it.
Image credits: TechRadar
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