Oculus Go
IS THIS THE STANDALONE HEADSET THAT CAN FINALLY TAKE VR MAINSTREAM?
OCULUS GO IS, in many ways, the dawn of a new era in virtual reality. It’s a standalone device, meaning it’s finally cut the cord from the PC. It’s also, of course, done away with the smartphone. You won’t be slotting anything into the Oculus Go except your face.
As a piece of hardware, the experience with the Go is almost as good as its brother, the Oculus Rift. We have been continually impressed with how good the Go’s VR is. 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.
DESIGN
As soon as you take Oculus Go out of the box, you feel like you’re holding a device that costs $300. Its design is sleek and has some nice subtle touches. The straps are soft and adjustable, but while the headset feels secure on your head, we could feel it sliding up at times. Once on, Oculus Go feels incredible. 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.
It’s important to point out 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, while others are able to ignore it after a while. For us, it was a bit of both. The weight distribution is very much in the front, too. It rests right on your upper cheekbones, and once you’ve worn it for a while, an achiness starts to set in. We have yet to find a headset that has perfected weight distribution.
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. 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.
Oculus Go also includes a 3DoF controller. The controller feels good in the hand — we prefer it over the Google Daydream View and Samsung Gear VR controllers. You won’t experience the same level of immersion as you will the Oculus Touches, however. With Touch, your hands are brought into VR, and the controllers track your hand and arm movements. This isn’t the case with the Oculus Go controller; it’s not much more than a point-and-click remote.
PERFORMANCE
Despite its relatively low price tag, the Oculus Go gives even the premium competition a run for its money. We were shocked to find that it offered a comparable experience to the PSVR headset when pushed to its limits. As a standalone unit, it wipes the floor with the likes of Google Cardboard and the Samsung Gear VR, while pushing what we should now come to expect for our money from the more expensive headsets, too.
It is, however, 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° world, and have your controller tracked within it, you can’t move through the virtual space.
It’s equally worth noting, though, that the Go is designed to be an entry point for VR. Once you’re in a game or VR experience, however, it’s hard to fault the Oculus Go. Tracking is accurate and comfortable, with little jerkiness that could otherwise increase the chances of feeling unpleasant nausea.
The 5.5-inch, 538ppi panel (2,560 x 1,440) 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 to have better pixel fill, meaning the pixels are simply larger. The goggles in front of the screen appear improved over those of the Rift. 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.
Battery life is a bit of a double-edged sword. You’ll get around 2 hours of gaming from a 3-ish hour charge, or 2.5 hours of video. However, you’re unlikely to want to spend that much time in a single undisturbed stretch, 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 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 optimisation here.
GAMES AND APPS
Games and experiences on the Go are a varied bunch — there are over 1,000 apps, movies, games and short-form VR experiences at launch, 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.
Perhaps the best example of Oculus’ ambition with the Go is the new Oculus Rooms app. This is a customisable social space in which you can hang out with pals, play chess, share photos and watch 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.
PERFECT FOR VR ON THE CHEAP
For a self-contained headset, not reliant on an external power source or processing unit, the Go delivers a diverse and approachable VR experience. It’s no Vive Pro, but it is the sort of device that would have seemed unfathomable a few short years ago.
THE CONTROLLER FEELS GOOD IN THE HAND — IN FACT, WE PREFER IT OVER THE GOOGLE DAYDREAM VIEW AND SAMSUNG GEAR VR CONTROLLERS FOR ITS ERGONOMIC DESIGN AND RESPONSIVE CONTROLS.