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Comment by scaryclam | Hacker News Reader

You could get a Valve Index instead. That's not tied to anything IIRC and is at least as good as the latest oculus headset.

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The Quest is unfortunately still a bit unique as the only standalone 6DoF headset. Edit: not truly unique as pointed out.

The Index is more than double the cost for something that requires spending more money for a computer to run the whole setup.

...not that that's for nothing, the results are better than any of Oculus' products graphically. But it's a different product.

Vive Focus and Pico Neo G2 are both standalone, 6-DOF, and still in production (unlike the Lenovo Mirage Solo, which was the first standalone 6-DOF). Hardware is nearly identical to the Quest (they all run Android on a Snapdragon 835). Software experience is quite different, though.

Wow I've never even heard of these, and I'm subbed to many virtual reality subreddits.

Edit: Upon further research, these are business/enterprise only, so they are not competitors to the Quest which is consumer first.

Reddit is a terrible place to learn anything about VR. Too many gamers.

I find there's some VERY good virtual reality YouTube channels. I find ThrillSeeker's weekly 10 minute "Tuesday Newsday" roundup [1] to be the most time efficient way to keep up with VR. In the past I used to regularly watch videos by Tyriel Wood [2], MRTV [3] and VirtualRealityOasis [4] which also often have high quality content and analysis but which focus on different things.

On Reddit, there has been some coverage of those headsets in the past, eg [4], [5] and [6], but it's easy to miss. I still find headset analysis from VR YouTuber the best.

Also not all tracking is equivalent. Some headsets released by companies are truly atrocious.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/ThrillSeekerVR/videos

[2] https://www.youtube.com/c/Tyrielwood/videos

[3] https://www.youtube.com/c/mixedrealityTV/videos

[4] https://www.youtube.com/c/VirtualRealityOasis/videos

[4] https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/7cs6jc/htc_vive_focus...

[5] https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/ektig3/first_new_vr...

[6] https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualreality/comments/hjymnn/pico...

I wouldn't say they are "truly atrocious". That makes them sound unusable. They're "slightly less good" than the Quest. They're very usable. They're not the best, but they get the job done.

On the other hand, I have had some headsets that were "truly atrocious". The Meta 2 was one. Never before or since have I had an AR headset give me simsickness. The PiMax 5K, with its nasty distortion at any view angle beyond the ~100° average of every other headset and its sole raison d'être, plus red image static, plus janky sidecar driver program. The Pico Neo 1, where the facial interface cut painfully into the bridge of my nose (I have it on good authority that the 2 corrects this issue for Western markets).

I was super disappointed when Google canned Daydream. I thought the Lenovo Mirage Solo was way ahead of the market.

The Vive Focus's controllers are a little flaky, but not unusable.

The original HoloLens was way too heavy, way to narrow of FoV, way underpowered, but hand tracking and built-in voice recognition, and MR desktop metaphor was quite something. I have yet to get hands on the 2, so I'm eager to get one. There's a quality of life experience with the software and the development lifecycle that is really, really missing from every other platform.

My point is that we should legitimately ignore the terrible headsets, but try to be a little more forgiving of the flaws of other the "not best-of-the-best" headsets. We absolutely need market competition in headsets. We must not allow Facebook to dominate VR. That is their end-goal, after all, and it would certainly be to the detriment of us all.

I'd be curious about what you mean by software experience. Presumably oculus home gets replaced, but is the performance of things like tracking noticably different?

Yeah, the home screen is "different" (though that's actually probably where they are the most alike). It's stuff like the boundary setup experience is very different. Their respective SDKs are incompatible with each other, so the available software library is very limited on the Focus and Neo. But they are also mostly "stock" Android devices (other than the VR related APIs), so as a developer there are no artificial barriers like on the Oculus platform.

Tracking-wise, there isn't a lot of difference. Certainly not enough to warrant giving all your data to Facebook.

I haven't tried the Pico but the Vive Focus is not anywhere close to the experience of the Quest, especially when it comes to tracking.

The Quest stands out because the tracking is as accurate and consistent as on desktop class VR headsets. The software and user experience is a clear notch above any other standalone headset.

Yes, the Quest is better, that can't be denied, but I don't think it's head-and-shoulders better. I think we need to be a little more forgiving of the minor flaws of the other headsets on the market (like the Vive Focus) specifically because we need to not allow Facebook to realize their plans of dominating VR [0].

[0] https://www.scribd.com/document/399594551/2015-06-22-MARK-S-...

I do think it's a level above the competition, thanks to their multi-year head start on the hardware-software integration (a la Apple) and their focus on VR comfort/quality. A year after it's launched, there's still no real competitor on the mass market side, just a few enterprise attempts (aka we haven't spent enough to get enough high-quality 3rd party content).

I think it might already be too late in terms of dominating.

Yes, aren't they for the enterprise market? I don't think that they're as easy to buy as a consumer as other headsets.

You can just buy the Vive Focus. I have the one with the eye tracking built in. There are a lot of games in the app store, so it's not clear that is "only" enterprise. Yes, they don't go out of their way to market it as a consumer device, but there isn't anything functional to prevent it.

In general though, I agree. There needs to be more 6-dof standalone headsets. I'd love to have a standalone WindowsMR headset. Something like HoloLens with lenses and OLED displays instead of the waveguides.

The Quest is pretty good, but it's not all that great to think that Facebook is an unbeatable juggernaut. Hell, all of the standalones (3-dof or 6) are still only running the Snapdragon 835 Mobile (not much more than clones of Qualcomm's first VR headset reference design), where the 855 and 865 have tracking on-chip. The 835 is not actually all that great for VR (it's what's running in my now-ancient Pixel 2), it's just the only SoC that hardware vendors have put the effort into. Hell, Qualcomm has two SoCs specifically for XR that nobody is using.

EDIT: correction, the HoloLens 2 is running on the 850 Compute Platform, which is mostly the same as the 845 mobile.

Apple will release a (portable) XR headset next year according to rumors.

That needs a powerful gaming PC though.

The whole reason the Oculus Quest is so popular is because it is a standalone device.

Yes, this was why I bought one, before the coupling requirement.

My brother got one and loved it, he raved about how fun VR was. I had considered it for a while, but I wasn't ready to commit $1000-$2000 for a capable gaming rig + however much the VR headset was going to cost just to try it out.

Oculus Quest was the perfect way to try out VR for me, a couple hundred dollars for a pretty good VR headset. No need to have sensors on polls or anything. Super lightweight way to dip a toe into VR and see if the medium was a compelling experience for me.

I remember researching if I had to login with facebook and found that you could just make an Oculus account with an email address. Got it, enjoyed it, still enjoy it.

The decision to couple the Oculus Quest and your facebook account puts a seriously sour taste in my mouth though. I think that when that deadline comes up, I'll probably just sell it and buy something that doesn't have that requirement, it will likely be time for an upgrade anyways.

The Index does, but there are a number of options that are not Oculus and provide the standalone experience. My point was really: there are other options that are at least as good, so you don't need to ditch the idea of getting VR.

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