The Oculus CTO held his traditional talk in which he analyzed the Go platform and the new Quest with absolute positioning.
John Carmack, CTO of Oculus, highlighted in yesterday’s keynote the technical challenges and milestones that virtual reality developers encounter today, which led him to analyze the launch of Go and the new Quest, which claims that it has a similar power to the previous generation of consoles (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, etc.). Although as always, the latter will depend on the quality of the game itself, because “it is not possible to take a game made at a high quality level (on Xbox 360 or PS3) and expect it to work well in VR”. Optimization will be key to getting the most out of Quest hardware.
Carmack commented that, realistically, Quest will end up competing as a device with Nintendo Switch, since he sees console users as the target audience for the new standalone viewer, although he doesn’t think there’s going to be a lot of people saying they won’t buy a PS4 because they’re going to get Quest.
As for the autonomous Go, he commented that the battery is one of the most important factors to improve on the platform, a task that can come from things such as optimization, the efficiency of the chips or by the simple fact of changing the battery for a larger one. Comfort is another great aspect to improve, and is that soft tapes are not the best solution, something that has been evident in the new viewers that have been coming to the market. Within that list were also factors such as storage memory, screens or input.
Throughout the keynote he also commented on certain details of device usage, such as that Go and Rift users use the viewer more than Gear VR users, or that only 20% of Go usage time is for gaming, which is probably just the opposite with Quest. Looking at sales, the Oculus CTO shared that Go had exceeded their expectations, and that more 64GB drives were being sold than 32.
We have the full talk available on YouTube.
