Oculus Quest might be being touted as the future of virtual reality (VR) – where Oculus is concerned anyway – but the company has yet to release many specs for the headset other than it being standalone with built-in inside-out tracking using Oculus Insight. The big question is how well it’ll stack up against Oculus Rift, with Oculus’ Head of VR Hugo Barra stating in yesterdays keynote address during Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) that it would provide ‘Rift like experiences’. That question became a little clearer thanks to a session which looked at porting content to the new device.
In the session called ‘Porting Your App to Oculus Quest’, Oculus Developer Relations Engineer, Gabor Szauer, discussed the processes developers would need to use to fine tune their videogame for the less powerful head-mounted display (HMD). While most of the talk gets quite technical – especially towards the end – Szauer does use multiplayer first-person shooter (FPS) Dead and Buried as an example, showcasing side by side comparisons of the two.
As you can see from the image above there’s not a huge amount of difference between the two, with the Oculus Rift version having better lighting thanks to real-time lighting and volumetric lights. While the Oculus Quest version uses whats called ‘baked’ lighting which is much less intensive to produce. And there’s greater detail not only in the scene but the gun itself for the PC version, with Szauer noting that the Oculus Rift version uses 6,917 polygons while the Oculus Quest gun uses a mere 33 polygons.
Easy to pick apart when side by side, in a hectic videogame like Dead and Buried you’re likely to notice this difference a lot less, especially when playing the new arena version, due to the physical nature of the gameplay.
To see it in action take a look at the video below. It’s the entire session so skip to 9:08 minutes in to see the short video demonstration. It probably looks even better in the headset thanks to the new lenses which are similar to Oculus Go. As further details regarding Oculus Quest are released VRFocus will keep you informed.