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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

Without Facebook's capital and Zuckerberg's commitment to VR, I doubt the Quest would exist. That project was announced in 2016 and was likely in development for a couple of years before that. Still it took until mid-2019 to be released to the public. IIRC, Carmack said that development on the Go was started after the Quest, yet the Go went to market a year sooner. I can only imagine what kind of hell it was to get a 2016 phone SoC to do VR with 6DOF inside-out tracking.

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Lenovo did it before the Go released (or about the same). It was kind of gimped because they went with the Daydream controller instead of full controllers but the headset itself was roomscale VR. It was also bigger and not as comfortable but worked on a previous gen SOC to the Quest. Check out the Lenovo Mirage Solo.

Since it only had two front-facing cameras, the Mirage Solo would have required extra hardware to track any controllers. Also I don't think there was ever an app for it that let you walk two steps away from the origin. The only truly room scale thing I saw was a demo written by some developers. They had to put the headset in dev mode and disable a bunch of safety mechanisms. I wonder if this limitation was imposed to minimize drift.

I developed on it and the limitation was mostly self imposed for safety/perf reasons. Its much easier to draw a consistent roomscale boundary on the Quest with the 6DOF controller. Without that its a real UX problem. Even the Quest is constantly asking to redraw the boundary. It was one of two SOC generations (as well as VR SDK gens) earlier and it was quite hard to build out a full room without a lot of perspective tricks.

There was an experimental add on for 6DOF controllers https://developers.google.com/vr/experimental/6dof-controlle...

It really wasn't a fundamental technical leap to go from the Mirage to a Quest. The Quest feels like a (well thought out) iteration instead of a revolution compared to the Mirage Solo.

Tracking controllers in 6DOF from headset cameras is the hardest part. Nobody has yet replicated this for a stand-alone headset.

Why do you say its the hardest part? Hand gesture tracking is quite hard, but tracking IR LEDs on a controller is much easier than tracking head motion as long as you have the camera setup to keep them in view.

Did they really need Facebook's capital? The market was absolutely flooded with VC money, Magic Leap raised almost $3B since then.

and did nothing, Oculus didn't just need money, but a competent team behind it.

This isn't correct. There were/are a lot of inside out VR headsets. Oculus just happens to have a brand, a solid marketing presence, a solid product, the appearance of longevity etc.

Facebook might have helped but from a purely technical perspective, Facebook wasn't the only path.

What standalone 6DOF headset with 6DOF controllers existed in the market in 2019 besides the Quest? Or now? I certainly can’t think of one?

How about Pico’s line of devices?

https://www.pico-interactive.com/us/neo2.html

“ Neo 2/Neo 2 Eye is available for businesses only. Please fill out this form if you are interested in ordering the Neo 2/Neo 2 Eye and we will get back to you once stock is available.”

Ah, didn’t see that bit, but at least we know the tech exists beyond Oculus’ labs.

The Lenovo Mirage Solo had 6DOF tracking with the Daydream controller. It had an experimental 6DOF controller add on but Google killed Daydream before that shipped. Inside out PC headsets exist with the camera setup for 6DOF inside out.

Currently the Quest is the only Android based (and thus fully stand alone) headset that's wasn't Daydream branded and wasn't killed when Google mothballed their VR support. There's less now then there were, or would have been if Google stuck with it.

sorry but no, what Oculus has is a team of strong engineers

Actually, not really. Inside out tracking runs on one core of my ancient AMD FX 6350 well enough. It was very doable.

Your ancient desktop CPU is powerful compared to Snapdragon 835 on Oculus Quest.

My ancient CPU is actually slower corewise than a Snapdragon 835. It's embarrassingly slow, about as fast as the first i5, if that. The snapdragon 835 is almost twice as fast as it corewise, actually.

Still outperforming on most of benchmarks. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/2817815 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/3344943

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