Oculus Quest review: 2019’s best new gaming system is wireless, affordable VR

I can take the Oculus Quest with me practically anywhere, pull it over my eyes, map out a VR space with my hands, and quickly start playing some of the best VR games currently on the market. That "anywhere" includes, for instance, the bathroom in the food court beneath Valve Software's headquarters.

Today is a big news day for Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality headset manufacturer. The company's two recently announced VR headsets, the $400 Oculus Quest and the $400 Oculus Rift S, now have release dates (May 21), pre-order announcements (right meow, right here), and a review embargo lifted after nearly two weeks of hands-on time.

But as you may have seen, there's other VR news today: preview embargoes for the Valve Index, which you can also read about on Ars today, have been lifted, too. Thanks to those neighboring testing periods, I did, in fact, get an opportunity to test one of Oculus Quest's use cases in the heart of one of its main competitors. It ended up being a pointed comparison. While the Index builds upon the home VR ecosystem as we know it—the cables, the connected "gaming" PC, the exterior sensors—the Oculus Quest throws all those requirements in the trash.

That "untethered" Quest bullet point is harder to sell in a press release. This headset's freedom needs many days of testing in the real world to really sink in, and it's softened by a few reality checks and questions (not to mention the F-word that is Facebook). But, by golly, I played a convincing, satisfying, and comfortable game of Beat Saber (you know, Brie Larson's new favorite game) roughly 15 floors below Valve's own world-premiere event, safely waving my hands around a spacious bathroom, with a kit that fit in my messenger bag. It only required 75 seconds of setup and loading.

This is not Jetsons-style hovercars or a cure for cancer, but the Oculus Quest version of the VR future is still pretty sweet to me. And the proposition here could be a milestone for this current generation of VR offerings: a cool, affordable, and low-friction step into legitimate VR experiences.

Cruz control

With that ridiculous anecdote out of the way, let's step back for a second.

The Oculus Quest landed in our homes nearly two weeks ago, following eyes-on time at no less than four major press events. As it turns out, the version we first saw more than two years ago, dubbed the Santa Cruz, is pretty similar to the hardware shipping to customers next month.

It has always had a Snapdragon 835 system-on-chip (SoC) foundation or something comparable. It has always had a pair of handheld Oculus Touch controllers, complete with a mix of buttons, joysticks, and finger-tracking capabilities. It has always employed an internal OLED panel at a remarkable 2880×1600 resolution. And it has always been advertised as a six-degrees-of-freedom (6DOF) VR system. Jump up, crouch, and step in any direction, and the Quest's array of built-in sensors will neatly map your head and hands to a virtual environment.

That full head and hand tracking makes the Quest a completely different class of VR than other untethered "mobile" headsets, such as Samsung's Gear VR, Google's Daydream, or Oculus' own standalone Go headset. Those 3DOF systems take the standard motion sensors found in a modern smartphone and translate their inputs to track real-life head motion... so long as a user keeps their butt planted in a chair. Stand up or step to the side, and the 3DOF VR illusion is broken. What's more, 3DOF systems can't track hand or controller motions in relative space, limiting users to wonky laser-pointer or Wii Remote controls.

Guardian of your galaxy

Not so with Oculus Quest. Out of the box, you can expect to see its handheld controllers tracked perfectly in any virtual environment—and Quest wastes no time selling this fact with its on-boarding process. As a first step, you'll don the headset (after initializing your Quest via a required Android or iOS smartphone app) and see a 3D, grayscale version of your real-world surroundings. The app's introductory video advises you to clear enough space in your preferred indoor location to wave your arms all the way around and step side to side (I once heard this described as a minimum of "two yoga mats" of floor space). If you want to go bigger than that amount, feel free.

Once you put your headset on in this cleared space, you'll be asked to map out your boundaries, which you'll do by drawing a "safe" zone in your real-life room. This is known as the "Guardian," similar to SteamVR's Chaperone system. Once it's active, any real-life steps close to its edge will throw up virtual walls as a warning.

Should you wish to use Quest in a tiny space or at a desk, pick the "Stationary" option in the Guardian menu, and you'll be surrounded by a default-sized dome. Be warned, quite a few games won't work without more real-world room to roam, but you'll still be able to browse around the Oculus Home interface, which includes a Chromium Web browser with built-in 360-degree video support.

Again, this is all happening without any external sensors or webcams to set up. Quest's four built-in sensors, which the company calls the "Oculus Insight" array, gather data about your play space and your position inside it. Oculus says the Quest can "memorize" up to five play spaces at any given time. So if you throw your Quest in a backpack, set it up at a friend's house, then go back to your home's VR room and put it on, the Quest will often respond by loading the Guardian boundary you already drew and asking you to confirm if it's still accurate.

In our tests, that Guardian "memory" only failed in one case. When the lighting had changed severely, from day to night, I had to redraw my boundaries. And though Quest doesn't work in pitch-black environments, I was still able to comfortably use the headset in my home's naturally dark lighting. Even when I shuffled certain things in my living room—primarily my office chair and coffee table, which I'm always moving for the sake of VR tests—I could re-enter the Quest with its tracking unfazed.

Just be warned, Oculus Insight isn't smart enough to detect a wandering pet or child that might alter your playspace while you're immersed in VR. Quest's tutorial videos include no less than four examples of a cartoon avatar picking up a dog, as if to emphasize how much dog death Oculus is forecasting thanks to wild Oculus Quest use.