Oculus Quest 128GB VR Headset

Pros: Light weight, easy to hook up, great build quality. Cons: Hard to get at this summer of rift price drop, third sensor is tough to find in stock. Overall Review: What an amazing experience. My wife played for hours and she Hates video games. The YouTube videos you watch on this product do not even come close to doing this thing justice. You will never understand until you put it on and play. Don’t try to compare to the little units you put your cell phone in, the quality and experience are not even in the same league. Of course people will be biased to what ever headset they get, either vive or rift, but I can tell you for sure the experience is the same once you put the headset on, other than the controllers which are way better on the rift. My only grip is that the sensor cables are a little short, but easily remedied by at few cheap cables recommended on the Oculus site. The coolest part is that I can Wirelessly stream the video of the game being played via chromecast to my TV on a living room so everyone doesn’t have to crowd around a computer screen to see what its going on. The technology is simply amazing and works well. Be wary of reviews that are a year old with respect to the difficulty of setting it up, those issues are over. The set up is simple, intuitive and has you up and playing in no time at all. If you can find one, buy it, you won’t regret it. I haven’t been this excited about a piece of tech for a long time!

Pros: Great tracking (only two sensors) the touch controllers are very nice the free games you get with the bundle are fun and a joy to play. Cons: A pain to set up the sensors. Overall Review: About a year ago I got into vr using the Samsung gear vr. I thought that was the best thing ever, fast forward half a year and I stopped using it because it is just a phone. I debated for ever on the vive or the rift and when I found out the rift was on sale and it came with all this stuff I just had to take the leap. This thing is amazing, much better than the gear vr. I hardly if at all have a screen door effect. You can get so immersed in the game you’re playing and only get knocked back to reality by the guardian system. If you’re in doubt just buy it, you won’t regret it.

Pros: Games are just wow in this. I wish I would have saved money from a monitor and got this a year ago if you are thinking about this Get it! Cons: I broke my tv Playing a Game

Pros: The oculus dash software is very good. The sheer combination of features just can’t be beat. SteamVR can deliver you these features on an individual basis (provided you have a supporting headset), but cannot do it as quickly, conveniently, or as high of a quality. Passthrough on Oculus can be activated very quickly. Your virtual desktop is just a click or two away, comes up immediately, and captures at a high framerate in good quality. Getting back into your game after activating any one of these is a snap. On SteamVR, all of these functions are lesser, come with a loading time, and may even require an additional purchase of a third party app. Depending on what exactly you’re switching between, you might even have to close your game or the third party app, making multi tasking more difficult. The dash software and all functions of the headset are responsive enough that I can put on my headset first, and then use the passthrough function to pick up my controllers, which makes adjusting the headset easier and less time consuming. The touch controllers are excellent, even for large hands. The analog stick, buttons, and touch sensors are all extremely responsive and feel good to press. No issues with detecting where my fingers are, everything just works the way it’s supposed to. Controllers come in at a good weight and I had zero problems playing a wide variety of games with them. I can hold them in my hands for hours and they never get tired. Oculus has good market share and all of the best games are going to work with your headset. Legacy titles that are not aware of the Rift S will show you CV1 or “gen 1” touch prompts, which translate 1:1 to what your rift S controllers can do, so long as you can overlook the different model. For compatibility modes (using OpenVR/SteamVR to play a non-oculus API game), binding controls for games designed for Vive Wands can be tricky because the analog stick is not always a suitable trackpad replacement, but this is largely on a game by game basis and is not likely to come up with the games people are playing today. Screen clarity is good, very little screen door effect. Visuals are super sharp, even text. The headband is easy to put on and take off, especially if you’re going to be sharing your headset with others. This is quite possibly the lowest possible friction solution. The batteries are user replaceable. If they die in the middle of a session, you can pause your game (if the controller dying out didn’t pause it for you), replace them, and get back into the action quickly. You never have to think about charging the controllers, and there’s literally zero risk of a battery going flat halting your session for an entire day. Not building a battery in means the controllers are also never at risk of becoming paperweights because the non-serviceable battery died out. Glare and “rays” are manageable. Compared directly to the index, the Rift S has less of both. Glasses fit well inside the headset, and even after weeks of use from my wife that is using larger glasses with a metal semi-rimless frame, there’s not a single scratch on either lens. Cons: The built in audio is bad. We’re talking smart phone speaker levels of bad. It’s got a good range for spoken dialogue, but bass is entirely absent. This may be good enough for many game experiences, but if you specifically plan to play beat saber or happen to enjoy high quality audio, you’re going to want to use headphones, which adds another layer of friction to starting up VR and can reduce comfort / the length of play sessions. The contrast and color depth feel lacking, but I specifically notice this problem because I have a long history of using VA monitors (known for their excellent contrast ratios) and OLED TVs (which have perfect blacks). It’s definitely off-putting in horror game experiences, but feels less problematic and not that noticeable in a more balanced game experience. No Man’s Sky, Beat Saber, Job Simulator, and GORN are all immersive and appear to have good blacks when and where appropriate due to the fact that these games in particular rarely present you with a full or nearly-full black screen. The IPD is not adjustable, and if you are too far outside the range of the fixed IPD, you’re going to have a bad time. The closer you are to 63.5, the better your FOV will be, the more edge to edge clarity you’ll have, and fewer stereo image overlap problems you’ll have (ie: One eye receiving blur or distortion where another one is not, mostly visible when looking at the edges of the screen, this resolves poorly and can give you headaches or fatigue) The halo style headband is easy to use, but it can be uncomfortable. Often, you must choose between maximum FOV/visual clarity or maximum comfort. If I really cinch it up tight I can get amazing clarity (near edge to edge) and good FOV, but it feels like it’s compressing my skull at that point and I can’t play for long. If I loosen it up too much, the headset can wobble which is disorienting if I look quickly to the left or right. Finding a good balance can be tough sometimes, but this matters less if you only play VR for an hour or so. The Rift S uses the USB port to transmit audio, tracking data, and receive all the power the display, speakers, and other components need to function. This will quickly expose any shortcomings in your USB chipsets, either built into your motherboard or in any add-on cards you have. This can express itself in a variety of ways, either through popping audio, headset jitter, loss of tracking, camera blackouts in passthrough mode, or a total headset crash, requiring you to restart the oculus software. It all really depends on exactly how far out of spec the USB port is. Troubleshooting this can be a nightmare, and add-on cards don’t always fix this, or can just present a similar level of problems just in a different way (maybe you don’t get jitter anymore, but you get more audio popping) The face gasket is removable, but not replaceable. If it has any anti-bacterial properties at all, they’re lacking. If you plan to work out in this thing, it’s going to get funky. The padding in the headband is not easily cleaned either, because even if you detach the display portion, you can’t just rinse it – the speaker components are inside of it. You can wipe it down, but this will only help so much. The batteries are user replaceable. This means an additional expense in the form of high quality batteries you can recharge, or an ongoing expense for disposable batteries. While having a battery you can replace does mean the controllers will never become paper weights, dumping disposable batteries can be hazardous and not everyone has the means to recycle or dispose of them properly. This is a hidden cost either way. Compatibility with non-oculus games feels tenuous. A single toggle in the software “allow unknown sources” is all that lets you play games that aren’t launched or purchased from the oculus store. Technically, they can disable this at any time and you’d have little recourse. They don’t have a good reason to do this, but they can. Technically, Valve could do this with the Vive or Index as well, as the headsets simply don’t function without their respective proprietary software, but given the business practices of Facebook (which owns Oculus), it feels more in the realm of possibility that they’d engage this kill switch some day. There is no upgrade path to full body tracking. Your interactions with games will always be limited by what is possible with tracking your head and the function of the controllers. This is a pretty big drawback for anyone interested in engaging with full body tracked content, like VRchat. Overall Review: Speaking as someone that has purchased both a Valve Index and a Rift S for my household, I am finding myself quite envious of the touch controllers and the oculus dash software. SteamVR and the friction of everything that’s not just “launch a game” in SteamVR makes me miss the Rift S as my primary headset more and more by the day, and this is coming from someone with an IPD of 66.5, outside the ideal range of the Rift S. I would say that the software experience of Oculus is vastly superior to SteamVR, and the ease of use is definitely much better, which makes it easier to jump in and out of VR, or briefly engage with the virtual desktop to use the computer without taking the headset off. The controllers are also excellent and make playing games feel very nice. The headset hardware itself is lacking, which detracts from the experience. If the Rift S were a slightly more premium product (better built in audio, better screen with a mechanical IPD adjustment, external power source to reduce likelihood of USB related problems), it would be an immediate and obvious recommendation. As it exists now, it comes with several compromises which require a lot of research, thought, and possible demo time to determine what you actually prefer.