Oculus S VR
More Oculus Rift 1.5 than a true successor.
The Oculus Rift S should represent the next leap forward for the company’s high-end, PC-based virtual reality experiences. But in practice, this is more of a baby-step – the Oculus Rift S is not a true “Oculus Rift 2” successor.
First, the fit. Whereas the Rift (and Quest) used a thin rubbery strap that went over your crown and around the back of your head to two firmer points over your ears, the Rift S adds a padded plastic curved mould where your forehead and base of the skull are. There’s still a velcro strap for positioning the headset, but it’s now primarily tightened by a dial on the back headrest. It’s comfortable enough, though it in fact feels heavier than the original Rift in terms of its frontal weight distribution.
There’s a good reason for this though – the Rift S does away with external motion tracking sensors, which previously required you to use up USB ports on your PC
and trail cables around your room and desk, in favour of outward facing cameras. These are used to track your position in the room and the movements of the superb Oculus controllers in your hands (an included part of the package here).
A pair of touch controllers ship with the Oculus Rift S, and these are slightly different to their predecessors. In play, you won’t notice any difference against their older stablemates.
However, not all the changes are necessarily for the better. Firstly, the Rift S has ditched the Rift’s over-ear earphones in favour of directional speakers in the headband. On the one hand, they offer a reasonable sense of directional audio in relation to what’s happening in the scene in front of you, while also letting your unobstructed ears listen out for what’s happening in the real world. After all, with your senses obscured by the VR world, it’s handy to be able to have an ear out for what is happening in the game world around you.
Internally there are changes too. The Rift S swaps out the first Rift’s dual OLED screens for a single LCD upping the resolution to 2560 x 1440 for what should be a sharper image.
But it also reduces the refresh rate from 90Hz to 80Hz. This is intended so as to keep the price down as well as keeping the minimum specs for the device the same as that of the Oculus Rift, letting more people get onboard without having to upgrade their PC gear. But it also runs the risk of aggravating those that suffer from VR-induced motion sickness, with the screens not updating at a rate your brain perceives to be natural.
The Oculus Rift S has had to sacrifice greater audio and refresh rate to make it more accessible, and does very little to appeal to those that have already invested in the Oculus ecosystem. On top of that, the actual experience of wearing a VR headset has, for better or worse, remained more or less unchanged – whether that’s something you’ll find fascinating and comfortable, or isolating and nauseating, or otherwise.
Which makes the decision to not jump in with two feet and push the limits of VR even further forward tough to extrapolate. Who is this for? If the original Rift didn’t coax the casual, I’m not certain that an improved set-up experience will shift the dial for those still on the fence. And so not to cater to the dedicated hardcore VR fan leads us to believe that Oculus runs the risk of letting its most loyal fans begin to eye-up the Valve Index instead.