Well, the waiting is finally over. Pre-orders start today for both the Oculus Rift S headset (the replacement for the original Oculus Rift VR headset) and the standalone Oculus Quest, and they will begin shipping on May 21st, 2019. A lot of eager fanboys on the Oculus and Oculus Quest subReddits are no doubt bitterly disappointed that the Quest did not start shipping today, but three weeks is not too long to wait.
Of course, I placed my pre-order on the Oculus website for the Oculus Quest with 128GB of memory for CDN$699 this afternoon. Gotta have the latest gadget!
My Oculus Rift headset, which I originally bought in December 2016 and had replaced in January 2017 due to a defect in one of the lenses, is still serving me quite well and I see no need to upgrade to the Rift S at this time. After all, it’s not what I would consider a next-generation update, it’s more like a half-step upgrade. I can wait.
It looks like the battle for the high-end PC-based virtual reality headsets is just beginning! If I were Facebook/Oculus or HTC, I would be a little concerned about Valve’s entry into the marketplace.
I admit it: I’m a gadget freak. When the first Amazon Kindle was announced in Canada, I bought one. When the first Apple iPad was launched, I bought one. And when the Oculus Quest is finally officially released, I will be buying one.
I predict that the Oculus Quest will be phenomenally popular, and help to finally usher in the long-awaited consumer VR market everyone has been forecasting for years (and getting wrong). I also predict that any social VR platform that supports the Oculus Quest will get a boost as well. So far, for the top 12 most popular social VR platforms, it looks like this:
*Obviously, there’s going to be something from Facebook/Oculus, but whether it will be a rebranding or extension of Facebook Spaces, Oculus Home, or Oculus Rooms, or something completely different, no one knows. And Facebook is keeping that a closely guarded secret for now.
While both High Fidelity and Sinespace have said that they will be supporting the Oculus Quest, I have as yet heard no official announcement from either of them. The same goes for AltspaceVR.
Today, VRChat launched their Quest Creator Program. And for the first time, we get some clear indications of what features will and won’t be allowed for VRChat worlds and avatars intended for Quest users.
It will be a dual-publishing model: publish once for PC users (i.e. Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows Mixed Reality headsets), and publish a second time for Quest standalone headset users. If a creator publishes only for the Quest, their world(s) will only be visitable by users in the Quest. If the creator publishes only for the PC, Quest users will be unable to visit. Here’s a Venn diagram for those of you who like Venn diagrams:
Worlds published for both PC and Quest will have a cross-platform icon (the central symbol in the image above) in the VRChat Worlds Atlas. Users from both platforms can meet in cross-platform worlds. Quest-only worlds won’t show up for PC users, and vice versa. PC-only avatars will not display to Quest users (a default avatar will display instead).
While building worlds, you should try to keep polygon count low. You want to leave room for the user’s avatars as well. We recommend that you budget approximately 50,000 triangles for your world in total.
The same general rules apply for avatars that apply for worlds. Keep in mind that you may have 10 or more users in the same room, so you’ll want to budget your triangle usage pretty heavily. We recommend that you aim for 5,000 triangles for your avatar.
This will be a challenge for avatar authors that prefer to import characters from various platforms rather than create an avatar themselves. Decimation down to this level can be destructive, and you may need to look into techniques like retopologizing geometry to keep your polygon count low.
Quest worlds cannot use custom shaders or post-processing, and regular shaders and audio sources will be limited. Quest avatars also cannot make use of features such as dynamic bones, cloth, cameras, lights, and audio sources. Particles and shaders will be limited.
We can expect that similar restrictions will be in place for other social VR platforms for them to work on the reduced processing power and memory of the standalone Oculus Quest headset.
Oh, and in an interesting twist, Quest developers will soon be able to use the Oculus Go as a sort of testbed for their work. However, this is only an interim measure to allow for testing, and VRChat has no plans to actually release a version of VRChat for the Oculus Go:
In my earlier blogpost discussing which social VR platforms the Quest would support, there was a bit of debate as to whether or not it would be even possible to pare down the VRChat experience so that it would run acceptably on the Oculus Quest. It would appear that the company has successfully been able to accomplish this difficult feat.
It’s not clear whether VRChat will be one of the applications available at the official launch of the Quest, or sometime later. (We still don’t know when the Quest will be launched, other than “Spring 2019”.) It’s also not exactly clear what technical compromises will have to be made to the full-blown VRChat experience currently available to people using the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and Windows Mixed Reality headsets.
But wait, there’s more news! VRChat is not the only social VR platform to make an Oculus Quest-related announcement today!
We’ve long thought of Rec Room as one of VR’s most important apps. On top of playing together, players can also customize rooms to their own look and then share them with others to provide new types of experiences. In January, we reported that the game had reached over one million players.
Against Gravity also confirmed to UploadVR that the Quest version of the game will support cross-play. this is a key feature for Rec Room, allowing those with an Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, Windows VR headset and even a PSVR to meet up online. Adding Quest to that mix should help expand the player base.
So, both the number one (VRChat) and number two (Rec Room) most popular social VR platforms will be available for the Oculus Quest. This will open up a large new potential audience for both platforms. The question remains, though: how well will both virtual worlds stand up to the flood of new users? Interesting times ahead!
As most of you already know, I quit Facebook as my New Year’s resolution, and I am still quite happy with my decision.
One of the places where I have spent more time since leaving Facebook has been Reddit, which is home to many thriving communities such as the Oculus subReddit, with over 140,000 subscribers who discuss and debate various issues related to Oculus VR hardware and software. (Sometimes I cross-post one of my blogposts there.)
Mark Zuckerberg presents the Oculus lineup (image taken from The Ghost Howls blog)
First, it’s ridiculous that cross-communication between the Go and Rift communities is so difficult, especially with Quest coming. VR social presence should be an underlying infrastructure that the whole Oculus ecosystem can plug into… Oculus: don’t split the VR community simply because of which of your own platforms they buy. Make communication easy, automatic, and built in.
Second, where the hell is the metaverse/Oasis/shared world? I know, VR Chat, AltspaceVR, Rec Room, High Fidelity, etc. …but why has Oculus–let alone Facebook!–abdicated this whole sector to third parties?
Now, this poster has raised a valid point. Why is social VR across all the Oculus hardware such a disorganized mess? Currently, Facebook offers Oculus Rooms for the Oculus Go users and Facebook Spaces for Oculus Rift users. Is Facebook going to use the release of the Oculus Quest (which I predict will be popular) to try and clean up this situation?
Some of the comments to this poster are worth quoting (again, I am going to take it easy with the quoting, taking into account the feedback I have recently received). I did go in and write a lengthy response, outlining the situation as I see it, and pointing out that there were already many social VR platforms which have been in development for several years (Sansar, High Fidelity, Sinespace, etc.).
When I said that High Fidelity and VRChat were planning to support the upcoming standalone Oculus Quest VR headset, one person responded:
Sadly, I don’t think VRChat’s gonna support Quest. It’s just not compatible with mobile CPUs. Hell, it brings modern up-to-date PC’s to a standstill with too many people. I very much doubt the Snapdragon 835 can handle all the custom shaders, avatars, IK, etc. The team would basically need to do a full rewrite. And that’s unlikely unless the team was way bigger.
Someone else said:
Do you really WANT Facebook also own the social VR “metaverse”? That seems like a really terrible idea in general to have a monopoly control so many things. Especially one that has proven dozens of times that they could care less about our privacy in respect to their profits…
I for one HOPE Oculus fails WILDLY on social VR. The alternative would be the worst-case dystopian future for VR and likely disasterous for humanity as a whole in the long-term.
To which I say, Amen and Hallelujah. However, Facebook has the deep pockets (lots of money) and the hardware (Oculus) to totally up-end the current, nascent social VR market, if they finally get their act together and choose to do so.
And finally, one person said:
To me it comes down to this—people want Second Life in VR format. It’s true. A metaverse where you can build or be anything you want…but in VR. We know that SL’s infrastructure cannot be upgraded to do that. High Fidelity, even with the founder of SL, isn’t cutting it. And neither is Sansar, Linden Lab’s actual VR offering.
I believe there are two main issues impeding them. 1. Instances – every platform nowadays does instance based “world” creation. Worlds are not permanent, player join numbers are limited, and the worlds are not visually connected to each other. People want permanence! To be able to wander from one place to the next aimlessly. This isn’t just an issue limited to VR of course (hello WoW). The reasoning behind this is that it’s much easier on the server hardware. Personally, I’d deal with some lag to be able to participate in a true open world environment. And
2. Adult content – All of the platforms are scared as f*** here. They don’t want their brand to be ‘marked’ by that, they don’t want to have to figure out how to police it, etc etc. That stuff is not going away. Whether they admit it or not, adult content has kept Second Life alive and thriving for 15 years (they still have ~50k concurrent users). Bottom line—deal with it. Embrace it. It’s going to happen with or without you.
This wide-ranging and fascinating discussion is the kind of thing that Reddit has become well-known for, and I would encourage you to go over there and read all or most of it for yourself, and perhaps add your own comments.
