Oculus Quest, revisited

It probably didn't surprise you that I wasn't impressed with the Oculus Quest. I was listening to the Dad & Sons Podcast on the weekend, though, and they collectively came up with a counter-argument to my initial skepticism, which basically boiled down to a couple of points:

1. Facebook/Oculus are selling this as basically a VR game console, meaning that its US$400 price tag, with two VR controllers included, is in pretty much in line with their intended competition.
2. People who weren't interested in Oculus' Go or Rift products might just be interested in a US$400 VR gaming console, especially since it won't require them to pay for expensive PC upgrades anymore while still providing acceptable performance.

That got me thinking. The argument still felt wrong to me, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly why. I found myself mulling it over on the bus yesterday, though, and I think I've figured out exactly what my objections are.

As I see it, in order for FB/Oculus' latest product to succeed, it needs to clear all of the following hurdles.

Facebook announced Oculus Quest, and it's already obsolete... according to its designers!

Remember when Facebook won (and lost) a lawsuit partly waged over the way they poached John Carmack away from Zenimax/ID? I wonder if they're re-thinking that acquisition after Carmack compared their next-generation "all-in-one" Oculus device to last-generation gaming consoles?

For the record, here is how Facebook/Oculus described their new device during the actual announcement, as reported by Gizmodo yesterday:

“This is it,” Mark Zuckerberg said to a crowd of developers and press at Facebook’s annual VR developers conference, Oculus Connect. “This is the all-in-one VR experience that we have been waiting for. It’s wireless, its got hand presence, 6 degrees of freedom, and it runs Rift-quality experiences.”

And here is how Oculus' CTO described the Quest at the same conference, as reported by arstechnica:

In a wide-ranging and occasionally rambling unscripted talk at the Oculus Connect conference today, CTO John Carmack suggested the Oculus Quest headset was "in the neighborhood of power of an Xbox 360 or PS3."

That doesn't mean the Quest, which is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC, can generate VR scenes comparable to those seen in Xbox 360 or PS3 games, though. As Carmack pointed out, most games of that generation targeted a 1280x720 resolution at 30 frames per second. On Quest, the display target involves two 1280x1280 images per frame at 72fps. That's 8.5 times as many pixels per second, with additional high-end anti-aliasing effects needed for VR as well.

"It is not possible to take a game that was done at a high-quality level [on the Xbox 360 or PS3] and expect it to look good in VR," Carmack said.

So... it's wireless, but needs a four-camera room-scale setup to work, and it aims to provide a Rift-quality experience, but can't because it just doesn't pack enough processing power. Also, count on it, Quest will cost significantly more than the Go, if only because of those cameras... and Oculus Go isn't exactly flying off shelves. Why does this exist, again?