Oculus Rift S
MORE OCULUS RIFT 1.5 THAN A TRUE SUCCESSOR.
VIRTUAL REALITY HAS come on leaps and bounds since Oculus founder (and controversial VR poster boy) Palmer Luckey first introduced the world to the Oculus Rift back in 2012. Now owned by Facebook, 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.
If you follow along with technology, the name should ring a few bells. Both Apple and Microsoft append an ‘S’ to their products to denote an iterative improvement (like the Xbox One S and iPhone XS, for example), as well as to indicate that the product is backwards compatible and will, in time, replace the original. All of that is true for the Oculus Rift S.
DESIGN, FIT AND COMFORT
First, the fit. Have you used or seen a PlayStation VR headset? Then you’ll have a good idea of how Rift S is worn compared to its predecessor. Whereas the Rift (and Quest) used a thin rubbery strap that went over your crown (tightened here by a velcro strap) and around the back of your head to two firmer points over your ears, the Rift S adds a plastic curved mould (liberally padded with cushioning) 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 like all VR headsets, it doesn’t fully mitigate the fact you’ve got a weight hanging off your face. The Rift S is no different, and 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 favor 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 – they’re comfortable with face buttons for your thumbs to use, thumbsticks to push (with very sensitive touch areas on their faces to mimic resting your thumbs against your fingers), a trigger button for your index finger and a button in their handle to mimic a gripping, fist-making motion. They’re light and intuitive, and use a single AA battery each, rather than being rechargeable.
However, not all the changes are necessarily for the better. Firstly, the Rift S has ditched the Rift’s over-ear earphones in favor 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’s happening around you.
SCREEN SPECS
Internally there are changes too. Again, on paper they seem improvements, but it’s less clear cut in practice. 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 VRinduced motion sickness, with the screens not updating at a rate your brain perceives to be natural.
SET UP AND INSIGHT
The aforementioned camera-powered Insight system is elegantly simple. Once your computer has installed the necessary Oculus software and you’ve plugged the headset in, put the batteries in the controllers and put the headset on, the Rift S then shows you a black and white image of the real world around you, as seen by the cameras. All you then need to do is use the controllers to point at the ground and draw out an obstacle free play space, and you’re ready to go in as little as five or so minutes.
This safe play space is then represented around you like a Tron-style cage – it only becomes visible as you approach it or wave your controller-wielding hands through it, letting you know that you’re approaching the boundaries of your designated play area. If you need to check what’s going on in the real world but don’t want to take off your carefully adjusted headset, you just poke your head through the VR boundary and you’re again presented with the real world. It’s useful and intelligent.
PERFORMANCE
Despite its ease of set-up, the Oculus Rift S did still suffer from some stability issues. Using a machine that greatly surpassed the system’s recommended minimum specs, we’d often find that Oculus would fail to respond when booting up its software, with its screen remaining black. Likewise, this would sometimes occur when waking the headset from sleep (which should spring into life when it recognises it’s been placed back on your head after it’s been idle for a while). Sometimes this wouldn’t even be fixed with a computer restart, but only by unplugging the headset altogether.
In addition, the Rift S would occasionally slow my PC boot up speed to an absolute, five-or-more minutes crawl, despite having an SSD drive, unless the headset was unplugged completely.
FINAL VERDICT
The Oculus Rift S has had to sacrifice greater audio and refresh rate to do that, 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.
THE ACTUAL EXPERIENCE OF WEARING A VR HEADSET HAS, FOR BETTER OR WORSE, REMAINED MORE OR LESS UNCHANGED