I wouldn't blame you if you had absolutely no interest in checking out the Oculus Quest(opens in a new tab). VR's reputation isn't exactly great, after all.

The Oculus Rift and HTC Vive(opens in a new tab), which require powerful PCs, can be too cumbersome. Mobile VR doesn’t offer the same immersive experience. VR is far from dead, but it's nowhere near mainstream, either. What VR needs is a hero.

After spending a week with Facebook's(opens in a new tab) latest VR headset, the Oculus Quest, I really think it could be VR's knight in shining armor.(opens in a new tab)

The Oculus Quest is the VR headset I wanted from the start. It's standalone and wireless, meaning it doesn't require a connection to a PC or a smartphone to work, and it supports precision room-scale tracking without external sensors.

Setting up the Oculus Quest is quick and easy. Most importantly, the VR experiences — most of which are games — are finally ready for prime time. With 50 launch titles, the Oculus Quest has plenty of immersive content, such as the addictive Beat Saber, to dive right into.

Hardcore VR users will brush off the Quest because it doesn't pump out the most photorealistic graphics or erase the "screen-door effect(opens in a new tab)" with a higher resolution display, but none of these things really matter.

The Oculus Quest is convenient, immersive, and extremely fun — exactly what VR needs to succeed.

There are only so many ways to make a VR headset and, unfortunately, current technology hasn't advanced enough to shrink all of the parts so they fit into a pair of glasses. That's the dream, but for now, we're stuck with headsets that look like ski and scuba masks.

The Oculus Quest sports a hybrid design that blends the best parts of the Oculus Go(opens in a new tab) and Rift headsets together. As far as VR headsets go, it looks pretty darn sleek.

The front is made of hard plastic and has four cameras, which make up Oculus' Insight "inside-out tracking" used to connect to the Touch hand controllers. The sides, however, are covered in a soft fabric material that's reminiscent of the Rift.

A simple "Oculus" logo adorns the front, a power button is positioned on one side, and a USB-C port for charging on the opposite.

Weighing 571 grams (about 1.25 pounds), the Oculus Quest is about 100 grams heavier than the the Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, and HTC Vive. That’s because it’s crammed with all of the six degrees of freedom (6DoF) and hand-tracking tech. But I never found it too heavy for my face.


For the most part, the Oculus Quest sat comfortably on my head thanks to the well-designed head strap. Like the Oculus Rift, there are three adjustable velcro straps (left, right, and top) and they all connect to form a triangle to cradle the back of your head. This shape, as well as the thickness of the straps, are crucial to keeping the Oculus Quest firmly planted on your face.

At first, the Oculus Quest kept slipping off because I didn't take the time adjust the straps. But after a few seconds of finding the best tilt position and tightness, that stopped being an issue.

Built into left and right straps are two slits much like the ones in the Oculus Go. That's where the audio comes from. It's a little hard to describe, but trust me when I say the sound is really loud and clear.

While I mostly used the Oculus Quest without headphones, you can connect your own if you prefer a private experience free from ambient noise. There's a headphone jack on each side of the headset — good for lefties and righties. Both worked well in my tests with a pair of Audio-Technica over-ears and a pair of old Beats Solo 3s.

Oculus will also be selling its own in-ear headphones for $50, but I didn't get to try them so I can't say if they're any good or not.

Below the headset is a switch for adjusting your interpupillary distance (IPD) — the distance between the centers of the pupils of your eyes — and volume buttons.

By default, the Oculus Quest headset is set up for people who don't wear glasses. I wear contacts and had no problems using the headset as is out of the box, but with my glasses, I needed to insert the included "spacer" to extend the foam padding to add just a few centimeters of extra space so that the frames weren't bumping up against the lenses and scratching them.

Flipping the Oculus Quest over to the lens side, you'll find two Fresnel lenses that magnify the OLED display inside of the headset.

The OLED screen has a 2,880 x 1,600 resolution (1,440 x 1,600 per-eye) and is sharper than the Oculus Rift's 1,080 x 1,200 per-eye resolution, and the Oculus Go and Rift S's 1,280 x 1,440 per-eye resolutions.

Of course, VR visual fidelity is more than the number of pixels included on a display. There's also refresh rate and field of view to consider. The Oculus Quest display has a 72Hz refresh rate compared to the Rift's 90Hz, the Rift S's 80Hz, and the Go's 60Hz. What this means is the Oculus Quest's display can refresh itself 72 times per second. The higher the refresh rate, the less motion blur you'll see, and the less motion blur there is, the less likely you'll get nauseous from VR.

Holding the two Touch controllers — one in each hand — is not too dissimilar to gripping a split game controller.

With the exception of the position of the ring (positioned at the top of the controller instead of the bottom), the Quest Touch controllers are similar to the ones used for the Rift. Each has an analog stick, two buttons (A and B, and X and Y), a menu button or an Oculus button, a trigger button, and grip buttons.

They're powered by an AA battery (included in the box) and come with an adjustable lanyard to secure it around your wrist.

The Touch controllers feel light yet solid, and the buttons are all easily accessible and clicky.

More than anything, the controllers are accurately tracked right in front of you. Wherever you move the hand controllers, your virtual hands follow in the VR world. Ditto for when you press or rest your index and middle fingers on the trigger and grip buttons.

Ask anyone who owns or has ever used a VR headset what the single most frustrating thing about VR is and they'll probably tell you: setting up.

Until now, using a VR headset has been a serious test of one's patience. For PC-based VR headsets like the Rift and Vive, you needed to boot up your PC, power on your VR headset, make sure the sensor(s) were properly positioned, clear space if you're doing room-scale tracking, and then you could get started.

And it wasn't easier for mobile VR headsets. Samsung's Gear VR and Google's Daydream still required you to slot your smartphone in and calibrate your controller.

All of these steps took time away from using VR. With the Oculus Quest, nearly all of these pain points have been resolved so you spend less time preparing to enter VR and more time slingshotting birds into green piggies in Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs.

After the initial set-up, which walks you through setting up WiFi and connecting the Oculus Quest headset to a mobile app (for downloading content and updating the firmware), using the VR headset is stupid easy.

Because everything is built into the headset itself, there's no need to connect the Oculus Quest to a PC or adjust external sensors for head and hand-tracking like you do with the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive.

Entering VR literally takes a couple of seconds. After putting the Oculus Quest on, it'll ask you to create a "Guardian." This is a virtual barrier for your play space and works similar to the "Chaperone" barrier on the HTC Vive.

If you're sitting down for stationary VR play, the Oculus Quest will automatically create a circular Guardian around your seat. And if you're playing with room-scale VR, you need only to draw on floor all of of your available play space. Oculus says room-scale VR is capable of tracking movement in spaces up to 25 x 25 feet. A minimum space of 6.5 x 6.5 feet is recommended, but I set up in a 5 x 6 foot-long space and the Oculus Quest didn't have any trouble tracking me.

The Guardian's pretty neat and an excellent way to prevent you from bumping into objects in the real world. If your head gets too close to the Guardian, a teal-colored virtual wall appears, which is a warning to not go any farther or you might hurt yourself. Poke your head outside of the Guardian's wall and the headset's cameras will activate its "passthrough" feature and allow you to see the real world in black and white. Similarly, if your space is large enough you can stand outside of the Guardian and peep into the virtual world.

Oculus says the headset is supposed to be smart enough to remember the Guardian you've set up in certain spaces, but I found this only to be partly true. While the Oculus Quest did remember the Guardian's safety zone whenever I took the headset off and put it back on, it could only do so temporarily. Every time I rebooted the Quest or moved to a new space and then returned back to an old one (e.g. playing at work and then returning home to play in my living room), I'd need to set up a new Guardian.

It's not a deal breaker since setting up the Guardian literally takes a few seconds to draw a circle around your space, but set-up would have been truly hassle-free if the Oculus Quest could remember pre-existing spaces where it had been set up before. 

Okay, so the Oculus Quest is really well-built and super easy to set up, but what about the VR content? Because everybody knows a VR headset is nothing if the VR experiences aren't up to snuff.

Fortunately, the VR games on Oculus Quest are really dope. The VR headset's launching with 50 titles and there will be more coming after its release on May 21. Oculus's positioning of the Quest as a game console is no coincidence. Simply put, it's easy to understand the value of the Oculus Quest's head- and hand-tracking with games, much like it was easy for people to instantly get Nintendo's Wii and its motion controls with a round of Wii Tennis.

Oculus shared with me roughly 20 or so games to try out, ranging from casual to hardcore, and after literally dipping my hands into these virtual games, I'm inclined to believe there really is something for everyone.

Of the many games I played, a couple immediately stood out. Beat Saber, a game originally released for the HTC Vive and then ported over the Oculus Rift and then PlayStation VR, is without a doubt my favorite VR game for the Oculus Quest so far.

In Beat Saber, your Touch controllers become lightsabers and your goal is to slash musical blocks in different directions as they fly towards you. Think of its as Guitar Hero but with laser swords. Having played the game on the Vive and PlayStation VR, I was eager to see if the Oculus Quest's inside-out tracking could keep pace with all the fast-paced air slashing.

After a single song, "$100 Bills," all of my worries about the Oculus Quest's hand-tracking disappeared. The four cameras that make up Oculus Insight easily created two lightsabers in VR and tracked them in virtual space as well as an external sensor could. 

Sports Scramble is another VR game that really highlights how immersive the Oculus Quest can be. The game features several sports — tennis, bowling, and baseball — where at first you're playing a regular match, but then things quickly turn into an unpredictable frenzy where tennis balls can turn into beach balls or frisbees, baseball bats can turn into golf clubs, and bowling balls can turn into giant cheese wheels. What Sports Scramble lacks in realistic graphics, it makes up with pure fun.

Another title that caught me by surprise was Virtual Virtual Reality(opens in a new tab), a comedic adventure game where you don VR headsets (how meta, right?) to slip into different VR worlds and complete mini games. At first I didn't really think much of VVR, but after getting sucked in by its hilarious storyline, I realized I had spent several hours inside despite only intending to spend a few minutes.

And that's really the story of the Oculus Quest: It's so easy to lose track of time in VR because the games are so polished, the head- and hand-tracking are so good, and the headset is so comfortable even during long sessions.

It didn't matter if I was punching a guy in the stomach in the boxing game Creed: Rise to Glory, or dodging bullets in slow motion in Super Hot VR, or embarrassingly busting a move to Justin Bieber's "Sorry" in Dance Central — I was so deeply immersed within the Oculus Quest's realistic sense of presence that I completely forgot I was in VR most of the time. And I wasn't alone in feeling so absorbed in VR: some of my colleagues were so hooked I had to pry the headset away from them or risk never getting it back.

I say I mostly lost track of the time because as great as the Oculus Quest is, it's not without some shortcomings. In some games such as Angry Birds VR: Isle of Pigs, the Oculus Quest's blindspot (below the headset where there's no camera to track the Touch controllers) is especially noticeable. Other times, the Touch controllers' battery covers would slide open if gripped too firmly. And of course, some games like the zombie first-person shooter Dead and Buried II did make me nauseous.

Did any of these downsides stop me from returning to the Oculus Quest for more playtime every day? Absolutely not. For sure, the Oculus Quest isn't packing the latest specs — its comparable to a two-year-old phone with its Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chip, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of non-expandable storage — but the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.

Battery on the Oculus Quest was better than I expected, too. Oculus advertises between 2-3 hours of continuous use on a single charge, and I sometimes got nearly 3.5 hours. 

Of the many technologies and products I've used in my entire life, only a few of them have ever truly hooked me. The original Game Boy was one. The internet was another. And so too was the iPhone.

VR? Ehhh, it was always cool and I definitely was hyped when the original Oculus Rift and HTC Vive came out, but neither hooked me like the Oculus Quest.

I'm certain now it was because of the wires and PCs those VR headsets needed. As much as I enjoyed using the Oculus Go, I stopped because it never could provide the same feeling of physical presence the way Touch controllers and room-scale VR did.

Oculus Quest shattered all my previous feelings about VR. With no cables and enough power to run games at Rift-like fidelity, Facebook's third VR headset really delivers on a virtual reality experience like no other headset before it.