Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “We were WRONG about VR”.
Thank you to oculus for sending out the quest 2 and sponsoring this video. This is the oculus quest 2, the follow-up to the incredibly awesome oculus quest. This is the easiest way to get in to vr. You don’t need a separate pc. You don’t need a separate room.
Most importantly, you don’t have to spend thousands of dollars. Everything you need to get your vr on is inside this box. So when you talk about the early days of vr and like what vr was supposed to be it was it was going to replace gaming. It was a new way to experience things.
It was going to replace your pc, replace your console. It was going to be your one stop for everything, kind of computer and gaming related, and if you frame it in that lens, you could say that like vr has failed, but what vr ultimately came into, i think, is way better with the initial conception ever could Have been, it became its own thing became a new experience and kind of a way to interact with with content and games and things in a way that was never possible before and if you look at it through that lens, i think vr has actually been a Huge success, so this is an all-in-one system and like by that i mean it’s really everything that you need. I mean you’ve got your controllers, you got the headset, it has speakers built in, so you don’t need anything else. Like literally inside of that box is all you need to go anywhere in the world with vr or play any of the vr games are available like this is just this.
Is it so pretty much everything about the quest 2 has been improved and i think three main categories so comfort, speed and quality. So the two lcd screens inside now have 50 more pixels, which is awesome more stuff. You can see the better.
It also makes images you’re looking at appear a lot clearer and perhaps most awesomely uh. They are now 90 hertz compatible. So if you’re playing a game or an app to take advantage of it, things should look super smooth like 50, more pixels, like sounds nice on paper.
It’S a cool bullet point uh, but an actual use case. It’S probably the first thing that you notice. So the two lens pieces obviously go over your eyes, a great sort of stereoscopic effect, but what it does it’s actually magnifying the image so normal pixels that would have looked fine on a tablet, for example, are now when they’re bigger, you can sort of see a Lack of resolution or lack of pixel density without 50, more – that’s, not an issue at all things actually look a lot crisper and clearer. Then you throw in and the ability to show 90 hertz stuff and things not only look high resolution. They also can look crazy smooth. So, aside from like pixels, i think the biggest area that you can improve on is speed.
Things need to render quicker and the experience just can always be faster. So inside of this, it’s the qualcomm xr2 chipset. It’S actually based on the crazy, powerful snapdragon 865. You take that couple it with the six gigabytes of ram.
You’Ve got an experience that is just head and shoulders faster than anything we saw before. On the first gen quest. The quest 2 is 10 lighter than last gen, and that matters i felt kind of a pull on my forehead and the bridge of my nose when i was wearing the last gen quest for long periods of time. I haven’t experienced that with the quest too. So if you had issues with that, or maybe your head felt uncomfortable, that alone might be a good reason to consider upgrading to the quest 2., i mean, aside from the weight everything else been redesigned too, so the straps have been redesigned, make it easier to get On you, don’t have sort of the rubber material that was here before it’s more of a softer, almost felt feeling i mean it just boils down to it just feels better to wear, and it feels definitely like a more evolutionary design. It’S something new, that’s here and all those little changes just add up to a better wearing experience. So, ultimately, i think a vr experience boils down to how you can interact with it.
Are you watching vr or are you like experiencing vr? I think the controls make a really big deal, so the quest 2 has really nice redesigned touch controllers and they actually took influence from like the big daddy of vr, the oculus rift, and these feel really good in the hand the sensors work really well. It just gives you a sense of actually being inside of whatever you’re doing, instead of just passively watching it. It’S like a small thing and it seemed like a small thing to talk about, but actually using experience. It’S a totally sort of paradigm shifting thing and you get something called pass through, plus with their guardian system and uh playing vr and running around you’re prone to hitting stuff right. You can’t see where you’re going what this does.
It creates a virtual wall that you can see inside of your vr experience. You can actually poke your head through it and i’ll use the cameras on the outside so that you actually see the real world. So not only are you don’t have to worry about sort of running into a wall because you can see the barrier, but if you have to interact with somebody actually in the real world, you can actually just push your head through or physically walk through that barrier And you can see them even with the headset on that is gigantic, and a huge improvement not only for safety of a virtual reality experience and also means that you don’t need like a totally separate room for vr. You can do it almost anywhere, if i’m being honest and in all candor there was always like some barrier to really getting into vr for some people uh. Maybe it was price you know.
Maybe it was that you had to be tethered to a really expensive gaming. Pc and you didn’t have the freedom to move around. Maybe you didn’t have a room where you could play your vr games.
Maybe you’re just worried about slamming into a wall, while you’re rocking out with some beat saber and that’s for something like the oculus quest 2. In the original oculus quest, i think you’ve kind of changed the game for what vr can be so first like under a thousand bucks like that alone is huge, but also standalone, i think, is probably one of the most important things you don’t need a pc anymore, Not even to get your games onto the oculus quests, this whole thing is all you need to experience the new worlds of virtual reality and then now with the quest 2 and technology getting better. The price point to entry is even 100 less quest.
2 is 299 bucks, which is a crazy price point for what you get inside of that box. Now you can upgrade for 100 bucks more and go 256 gigs of storage up from 64. If you want to put more games on it, but that entry point to get people to try, vr has moved from well.
I need a second mortgage to like almost impulse purchase and something that could be considered a gift for the holidays. So that’s the oculus quest too, and i think the question for a lot of people is: should you should you get it and should you upgrade, i think we’re all of us and me particularly i’m conditioned in the smartphone space. I think that the upgrade cycle from year to year to phones is generally not worth it.
You set a generation out, you get something better. Two years down the road but smartphones have been around for a very long time and sort of they’ve gotten to a point where they’re all really good. When you’re looking at vr, it’s changing so much year over year that the upgrade is now really significant.
I mean you’re talking, you know better optics, you’ve got 50 more pixels uh in there 90 hertz screens. These are things that really matter to the experience, and even if you take out the added comfort stuff that you get with the quest 2, the experiential difference is so drastic and divergent that i think this upgrade is actually really worth it. I wouldn’t hesitate at all to pull the trigger on two and, if you’ve been waiting to get into vr, there’s really no better time than right now and once again, thank you to oculus for sponsoring this video .