Oculus Quest, the latest VR headset from Facebook, enables full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking for both head and hands using the company’s new inside-out system called Insight. This brings the standalone headset closer to Rift-quality tracking than ever before, but it’s still not perfect.
Gabor Szauer, Developer Relations Engineer at the company, spoke a little about the tracking limitations of Quest (and, more specifically, its controllers) at a talk called ‘Porting Your App To Oculus Quest’ at Oculus Connect 5 yesterday. Quest is fitted with four wide-angle sensors at the corners of its front faceplate that deliver a wide field of view (FOV) for your controllers, but they don’t cover the area behind the user and may get lost if you stretch your arms far off to the side. Szauer called for developers to keep this in mind when porting games.
“This doesn’t sound like a big deal but you have to keep in mind that your field of view is not infinite, it’s actually attached to your face,” Szauer explained, showing the above slide that displays the headset’s tracking limitations. “There is some more obvious design considerations like if you’re reaching behind your head to grab something, you’re going to lose your controllers. Those are actually not too bad, if you’re only going to lose your controller tracking for a second or two you can usually fake it pretty easily.”
‘Faking it’ might mean some simple prediction algorithms that will allow you to carry out quick tasks behind you. It’s more of a cheat than anything else, but it’s worked for other inside-out systems like that seen on Windows VR headsets. “But some of the situations you get into aren’t so obvious,” Szauer continued, stretching out his arms to either side to imitate holding guns. “Like, let’s say I have two guns and there is a really, really loud sound coming from my right so I look over. All of a sudden, my left hand just left the field of view.
“For the most part it’s not going to be an issue but it is something to keep in mind.”
Szauer also warned that some interactions that would have users holding one controller over the other could occlude one’s tracking, which is another thing to be aware of.
We won’t really know how much of an issue this could be until we’re using Quest ourselves on a day-to-day basis. The headset’s coming in spring 2019 for $399.
There’s nothing like a good horror videogame to get the heart racing, especially when it comes to virtual reality (VR) content. Turtle Rock Studios released Face Yours Fearsway back in 2016 for Samsung Gear VR, and with the official unveiling of Oculus Quest yesterday the studio is developing a sequel, Face Your Fears 2.
On display at this weeks Oculus Connect 5 (OC5) conference in California, Face Your Fears 2 goes straight for the jugular when it comes to scaring the life out of guests, by introducing lots and lots of spiders, from tiny creepy crawly eight legged horrors, to massive beasts trying to climb through windows. So if you’re even slightly arachnophobic then this is the title for you.
As VRFocus’ intrepid reporter Nina finds out in her preview there’s plenty to make you jump, with a dark and dingy atmosphere nicely setting the mood before all those spiders start jumping at your face – which is usually most people’s main fear when it comes to arachnids.
Of course there’s the added benefit that Face Your Fears 2is on the very latest Oculus headset which features inside-out tracking. Before on the Gear VR version you could only look around and crumple to the floor screaming, much like Oculus Rift horror titles due to the cable. This time however you’ve got much more freedom to move around – depending on play area – and run in fright into a wall. Seriously, that probably won’t happen as Oculus Quest has the Guardian system but you never know.
Check out the video below of Nina talking about Face Your Fears 2 as well as playing the title in a suitably decked out location full of spider webs and such. VRFocus will be reporting from Oculus Connect 5 later today once the second day gets underway, so stay here for more VR news.
Facebook promoted its Oculus Connect 5 conference that kicked off yesterday as a look at “the future of VR.” After spending all afternoon trying four different demos on the upcoming Oculus Quest standalone 6DOF headset, I feel inclined to agree. Quest is due out in Spring 2019 for $399 and aims to deliver a “Rift quality experience” with full positional tracking and two Touch controllers without the need for wires or a powerful gaming PC to run it.
Before I cover my actual hands-on impressions, let me be clear: the Quest is not a standalone Rift. The Quest is also not a more powerful Go. As frustrating as it may be, Quest really does sit somewhere in between. It’s powered by a Snapdragon 835 chipset which is a few generations beyond Go, but it pales in comparison to some of the $1,000 gaming PC rigs people can build to power their Rifts. The controllers are very similar, but don’t expect Quest to entirely replace all Rifts next year or anything like that.
Oculus Quest Headset Design and Specs
In terms of physical design, Quest looks a lot like a Rift. We know it’s 1600 x 1440 per eye for resolution and has the same lenses as Go, but we don’t know the field of view yet but it felt about the same as Rift and Go. We’ve heard 72Hz mentioned in a session at OC5 as the refresh rate, compared to 90Hz for Rift. Anecdotally I will say it seemed to be about the same as the Rift in all meaningful ways, although the overall visual quality of the apps was a bit lower. But at the end of the day I can’t really know for sure without comparing them side-by-side. It’s reportedly powered by a Snapdragon 835 chipset and will feature 64GB of storage (for the $399 model) with over 50 launch titles.
The front of the device is smooth and rounded, not flat like Go. There are two velcro tightening straps on either side near your ears with a single thin strap across the top of your head — just like Rift. My glasses fit inside the unit just fine with a small light leaking nose gap. It didn’t seem to smash my face as much as the Rift does, which is relieving. It felt a bit heavier than the Go in the front, but that’s honestly to be expected with so much more power housed inside the unit.
Speakers are hidden inside the head strap, similar to Go, with improved audio performance. In all four of my demos the sound was crisp and clear, although at the end of the day if you’re using VR alone at home you’ll probably just want to plug in your own headset for the best audio experience.
On the underside of the headset, below the lenses, there is an IPD adjustment knob, similar to Rift, and a volume button, rather than volume controls on top like Go. There’s also a USB-C port for charging as well as a power button on the exterior.
Quest Touch Controllers Design
As someone that uses an Oculus Rift with Touch almost daily, holding the Quest Touch controllers for the first time was a bit jarring. They have the same type of analog sticks, two face buttons each, a menu button each, as well as a trigger and grip button each — but they just feel different.
The portion that actually extends down into your palm that you wrap your hand around seems a tad longer, which is actually nice since it felt like I had a better grip on them while swinging around in Tennis Scramble. But the tracking ring’s new placement to encircle the top of the controller, rather than the bottom, feels really strange. Perhaps it’s just because I’m so used to the existing Touch controllers that it bothered me, but they seemed noticeably top heavy from what I was used to. Obviously this was a necessary design change because the headset’s four tracking cameras (part of the “Oculus Insight” system) need to see the rings to maintain tracking, and it’s something that I did eventually got used to.
Buttons were responsive and felt great. My Touch controllers at home are starting to feel a bit stiff sometimes, so the smooth and fluid triggers on the Quest Touch controllers seemed really nice by comparison. I quickly forgot I was holding anything at all in most demos and just got sucked into the experience. If people can get used to the ring’s movement and weight distribution, these are just as great as the already excellent Touch controllers.
Oculus Quest Insight Tracking
During the OC5 day one keynote, Facebook leadership talked about what’s been dubbed the “Oculus Insight” tracking system. Basically the four cameras on the front of the headset read and analyze your playspace to see your environment and then also keep track of the two Quest Touch controllers. This means that the Oculus Quest Touch controllers are tracked with six degrees of freedom (positional tracking) wherever you move in 3D space. The same goes for the headset. So unlike Go, you can walk around, lean in any direction, and move through a room just like you would with Rift or Vive, but without any cords or external cameras.
The benefit to the headset having this type of inside out tracking is pretty clear, right? It gives you nearly total freedom. You aren’t bound to your playspace that has cameras plugged into a PC. I can stick Quest in a bag and bring it anywhere with both controllers and it’ll just work — at least that’s the idea. But this sort of tracking system does have some limitations as well.
For starters, the four cameras on the headset are front-facing only. This means that they can only see your controllers as long as they are directly in front of you within the cameras’ field of vision. Luckily since they are spread out into the corners of the headset the range was really good. Most of the time, even if I moved my hands to the side or down by my waist, Quest didn’t have issues keeping up with where the Touch controllers were at. But it wasn’t flawless.
I tried to put the tracking to the test a bit when I played Superhot VR by doing things like turning my head and then reaching for something that’s behind me or off to the side. Sometimes I could pick it up and bring it up in front of me, other times it didn’t work perfectly. And if I put my hands behind me or out of view, then slowly bring them back into view, there was a slight jitter while the cameras adjusted and relocated the Touch controllers again. The jitter lasted longer than a second and anyone that has ever used a Windows VR headset will know what I’m talking about.
In another situation I was playing 3v3 Dead and Buried in an “arena scale” setup that had actual boxes and pillars in the real world mapped to the same location in VR. With this demo I was able to freely move around the entire 4,000 square foot space, ducking behind boxes, and moving around a ton. No framerate drops and no headset tracking issues at all. But in one case when I reached around a piece of cover to shoot, the headset lost tracking on my controller. That’s because I was reaching around a real physical box so it occluded the view — in a normal roomscale setup, that wouldn’t happen.
Finally, during a discussion focused on porting Rift games to Quest, developers and engineers discussed two specific cases to watch out for in Quest games. First, is anything that requires reaching behind your head can be tricky — such as changing weapons in Space Pirate Trainer or pulling out an arrow from a quiver. Plus, in a game with a two-handed gun or a bow and arrow, your hands can actually occlude themselves because they’re held out in front of you, in parallel, blocking camera view of your furthest hand.
Those are very specific cases that I didn’t personally deal with today, but are worth considering. Overall I’d say Quest has obviously better tracking than Go, slightly better tracking than PSVR, but not quite as good tracking as Rift or Vive. In terms of 360, positional, roomscale tracking at home goes, the Vive’s external base stations can’t be beat — but the Quest is wireless and standalone at a much more affordable price.
Oculus Quest vs. Rift vs. Go
This is what everyone wants to know, right? Is the Quest basically a more powerful Go, or is it like a less powerful Rift? As of now it’s hard to say with certainty. However, because of the way the tracking works with 6DOF controllers and a 6DOG headset the closest point of comparison would be like a two front-facing sensor arrangement for Rift, but without a wire and with 360 movement. Let me explain.
When you use a Rift with two sensors facing at you, you’re able to stand up and use two Touch controllers. That means full positional tracking and hand presence. But since those two sensors are both in front of you, that means you can’ reach behind your head or occlude the controllers or else tracking suffers. Quest seems to be in a similar boat.
If you are doing lots of stuff with your hands that requires them to not be in front of you, then tracking is gonna have problems. That’s just the nature of how a camera works. But that being said, it re-aligns very quickly and does a good job of maintaining tracking even outside of view. Honestly, it worked better than I expected and if booth attendees hadn’t scolded me I’d have ran around very quickly.
At $400 (that’s literally the same price as a Rift) you’re getting a headset that looks even sharper than the Go’s excellent lens clarity, features 6DOF controllers and headset movement, no wires, no PC, and a launch library that’s gearing up to include quality Rift titles ported down and new experiences like Tennis Scramble and Face Your Fears 2.
That…is impressive. Time will tell if this has the effect on the VR market that Facebook clearly hopes it will, but the potential is certainly there. When recommending Go to people I found that it often came with too many reservations and caveats if they’d already tasted VR with Rift. Now I can tell someone that they can get fully-featured VR for half the cost of a new phone, the same cost as a game console.
With good marketing and a strong launch library, Oculus Quest feels like it really could be the first VR headset for absolutely everyone.
Oculus Quest, Facebook’s new VR standalone headset, is set to bolster its library with a host of ports of Oculus Rift titles when it launches next year. But, running with mobile hardware, can Quest really hope to achieve anywhere near the level of visual fidelity seen on the Rift?
As Developer Relations Engineer Gabor Szauer showed at Oculus Connect yesterday, it can get pretty darn close. Szauer ran a session titled ‘Porting Your App to Project Oculus Quest’ in which he detailed various optimizations made to one of Rift’s premier shooters, Dead and Buried, that allowed the team to squeeze the game onto Quest. This was the result:
Not bad, right? Now, obviously, Oculus itself has intimate knowledge of both PC and mobile development on its hardware, not to mention the limitless resources of Facebook to make these ports happen. It’s also true that Dead and Buried isn’t the most demanding Rift game (a sort of port is on Go, too). Still, Szauer’s tips for porting games should give developers a lot of help.
For starters, the developer cited a key component of any optimization system: baking the app’s lighting. This essentially means lighting is a static feature within an environment rather than an intensive dynamic system that sucks up processing power. The less Quest has to remember, the more it can focus on things that really matter.
Other tips were very much along the same lines. Szauer suggested developers merge objects in a room. Dead and Buried, for example, features 915 objects on Rift but just two in the Quest version which, yes, will mean you can pick up everything in a room, but it will give Quest a much easier time letting you walk around in it.
Another major factor is texture compression. Szauer showed examples of where texture qualities on characters and environments had been lowered ever so slightly. The difference to you and me is hardly noticeable but, as Szauer said: “Where we can’t really tell, the GPU can most certainly tell.
“This is kind of a trend you see in all the assets,” he continued. “Less textures, fewer polygons, preferably just one material so the whole thing can just render in one draw call.”
Games like Moss, Superhot and Robo Recall will likely also be calling upon these tricks for their announced ports for Quest. We’re going to be really interested to see how they turn out.
You can see Szauer’s full talk below. Hes’ got plenty more tips. As for Quest, it’s out next spring for $399.
At last year’s Oculus Connect, VP of Content Jason Rubin revealed that Gear VR’s Face Your Fears, a game with several scary showcases for the platform, was one of the company’s “biggest success stories” yet. Yesterday, we found out that a sequel is on the way.
Face Your Fears 2 was somewhat quietly announced during yesterday’s Connect 5 keynote, being shown in a demo reel for Oculus’ new standalone VR headset, Quest. Since then Turtle Rock Studios, the makers of the original game, have confirmed that they’re working on the new iteration. It’s even on display at Connect this year with its own spooky booth, as seen in the pictures below.
Face Your Fears 2 is at #OC5 being played hands on for the very first time! Check it out if you’re here… and very, very brave. pic.twitter.com/dp8Sg6e3Kn
The footage on-stage had a crow fly at the user’s face, which didn’t look pleasant at all, but that’s kind of Face Your Fear’s objective. The original game featured relatively short sequences designed to play on people’s fears in often cruel ways, selling expansions on the Oculus Store. It made for a great way to showcase the power of VR, even on three degrees of freedom (3DOF) headsets like Gear VR and Oculus Go.
It looks like Face Your Fears 2 is shaping up to be a launch title for Oculus Quest next spring. No word yet on if it will also coming to Gear and Go.
Oculus Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, kicked off yesterday with the surprise announcement of a new high-end standalone VR headset. Dubbed Oculus Quest, the headset is being shown off at Connect in an array of colors outside of the initially advertised matte black.
A purple and orange variant were seen in a special arena-scale demo of Dead and Buried, which is being positioned as an out-of-home offering.
Image captured by Road to VR
There’s currently no word from Oculus whether the colorful variants will be offered to consumers or businesses when the headset launches in Spring 2019, although it’s clear at very least the company is toying with the idea.
If the colored Quests do come to market though, this will be the company’s first ever color option for any of their headsets, as both Rift and Oculus Go respectively come in black and light grey.
Want to learn more about Quest? Check out our hands-on with Quest for a deep dive into everything we know about the headset.
Oculus Quest was the main attraction at Oculus Connect 5 this week. Following the high-end standalone headset’s reveal, attendees of the conference got to try several demos to experience the headset’s inside-out positional head & hand tracking, including in an ‘arena-scale’ setting. We also got a handful of interesting details about the headset’s specs and capabilities.
Oculus Quest (formerly Project Santa Cruz) is officially set to launch in Spring 2019, priced at $400. While that’s twice the cost of the company’s lower-end Go headset, it could certainly be worth it for the much more immersive class of games that comes with positional tracking (which the Go lacks). But that will only be true if the inside-out tracking tech, which Oculus calls ‘Insight’, can really deliver.
Quest ‘Insight’ Tracking
Photo by Road to VR
Insight seems to be shaping up to be the best inside-out head and hand-tracking that I’ve seen to date. I say “seems” because I haven’t had a chance to test the headset’s tracking in a non-demo environment. The tracking system relies on recognizing features of the surrounding environment to determine the headset’s position in space; if you played in an empty room with shiny, perfectly lit white walls, it probably wouldn’t work at all since there wouldn’t be sufficient feature density for Insight to know what’s going on. Demo environments are often set up as best-case scenarios, and for all I know something in my house (or anyone’s house) could really throw the system off.
Oculus claims they’re tuning the headset’s tracking to be robust in a wide range of scenarios, and as long as that remains consistently true, Insight will impress many. While other inside-out tracking systems either lack positional controller tracking entirely, or require some compromise on the size of the controller tracking volume, Quest’s four cameras, mounted on the corners of the headset, cover an impressively wide range that I effectively couldn’t defeat. A simple test I’ll often do with such systems is to move my outstretched arm as far outside of my own field of view as possible, then move it while (hoping to have lost the view of the tracking cameras), then bring it back into the tracking volume from some other angle. Generally I’m trying to see my hand ‘pop’ into existence at that new point of entry, as the cameras pick it up and realize it wasn’t where they saw it last.
Despite my efforts, I couldn’t manage to make this happen. By the time my hand came anywhere near my own field of view, the hand was already re-acquired and placed properly (if it had even left the tracking volume at all). I would need to design a special test (using something like a positional audio source emitted from my virtual hand) to find out if I was even able to get my hand outside of the tracking volume, short of putting it directly behind my head or back.
So that means there’s vanishingly few situations where tracking is going to harm your gameplay, even in situations that would normally be cited as problematic for inside-out tracking systems, like throwing a frisbee or hip-firing a gun. Two specific scenarios that I haven’t had a chance to test just yet (but believe will be important to do so) is shooting a bow or aiming down sights with a two-handed weapon. In both scenarios, one of your hands typically ends up directly in front of, or next to your face/headset, which could be a challenging situation for the tracking system. I’ll certainly test those situations next time I have Quest on my head.
In any case, it feels like Oculus has done a very good job with Quest and its insight tracking system. Assuming Quest can achieve a consistently high level of robustness once as it finds itself across a huge variety of rooms and lighting situations, I think the vast majority of players wouldn’t be able to reliably tell the difference between Quest’s inside-out tracking and Rift’s outside-in tracking in a blind test.
And that has big benefits beyond just getting rid of the external trackers. For one, it means the device has 360 roomscale tracking by default rather than this being dependent on how many sensors a Rift user chooses to buy and how they decide to set them up. Additionally, it means players can easily play in much larger spaces than what was previously possible with the Rift.
At Connect I played a few demos with Quest, one of which was Superhot VR. The game was demoed in a larger-than-roomscale space (about the size of a large two car garage) and I was free to walk wherever I wanted within that area. When it came to hand-tracking, I played the game exactly like I’ve played it on the Rift many times before, without noticing any issues. Being used to tethered headsets, it was also incredibly freeing to take a few steps in one direction and not see a Guardian/Chaperone boundary, then simply keep walking for many more steps before needing to think about the outside world.
Oculus took this to the extreme at Connect in an experiment they put together to show how Quest tech is capable of ‘arena-scale’ tracking. They created a large arena space, about the size of a tennis court, and put six players wearing Quests inside to play a special version of Dead and Buried. Physical cover (boxes of varying sizes and shapes) covered the area, and players could physically walk anywhere around the arena and use the cover while shooting at the other team.
A rendering of the arena set up at Oculus Connect for ‘Dead and Buried Arena’. I added a little red stick-person for scale. | Image courtesy Oculuis
Through my time in this demo I didn’t see any jumping in the positional head tracking, even while I walked 10 to 15 feet at a time from one piece of cover to the next.
So, Quest is shaping up to deliver the same kind of quality positional tracking experience that most of us associate with high-end tethered headsets today, but now with more freedom and greater convenience. That’s a big deal at a $400 all-in price point.
Oculus Quest, Facebook’s new standalone VR headset, is promising over 50 games for launch next year, and a list of developers shown at this week’s Oculus Connect conference gives us some idea of what’s on the way.
Hugo Barra, Facebook’s VP of VR, revealed a look at a handful of developers that have been experimenting with Quest and its six-degrees of freedom (6DOF) tracking over the past year. On-screen behind Barra was a list (seen above) that included Lone Echo (and Lone Echo II!) developer Ready at Dawn Studios, Rock Band VR creator Harmonix, and Dragon Front studio High Voltage Software.
There were also some developers with already-confirmed Quest games, like the Superhot team and Polyarc, the developer of Moss. Other VR staples include Arizona Sunshine‘s Vertigo Games, Sprint Vector‘s Survios, and Wilson’s Heart‘s Twisted Pixel.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily confirm these developers will definitely have Quest games ready for launch. Barra described these team’s work as “exploring what’s possible and what they can build on Oculus Quest.” Still, practically every developer on the list has at least one Rift, Go or Gear game that we’d love to see ported to Quest (Echo VR please), so we’ll keep a close eye on them.
Barra’s words also led into a video that revealed yet more developers that have been playing around with the device, including Insomniac, the studio behind the upcoming Stormland (or, for most people, those guys that just made that great Spider-Man game) and Tender Claws, the makers of the ever-excellent Virtual-Virtual Reality.
Quest is arriving in spring 2019 for $399. Expect full impressions of our hands-on time later today.
Oculus had a lot to say about its new standalone VR headset, Quest, at the opening keynote for Oculus Connect 5 yesterday, but one thing it didn’t really mention was the processor powering the device. We now know it’s a Snapdragon 835.
Oculus confirmed as much following the kit’s reveal in San Jose. The 835 isn’t the latest processor from Qualcomm (it’s used in Samsung’s Galaxy S8 but was replaced with the newer 845 in this year’s Galaxy S9), but it is a step up from the 821 found in Oculus’ other, lower-cost standalone, Oculus Go. It’s also used in other standalone devices like Google and Lenovo’s Mirage Solo.
Go, though, is still able to run a wide range of Gear VR apps given that its older hardware is entirely dedicated to VR performance and not being partially applied elsewhere as it would on a smartphone. We can expect the same to be true of the 835; it won’t be as strictly powerful as an S9 but all of its horsepower will be going on VR alone. That might be one of the key reasons why Oculus is going to be able to get games like The Climb and Robo Recall onto the device. Still, don’t expect these games to make it to Rift unscathed in some way, be it visual downgrades or reduced enemy numbers, and we doubt more intense games like Lone Echo will be able to make their way over.
We also know Quest offers 1600 x 1440 resolution per eye, which is basically the same as Go, and it sports built-in audio too. It’s also got full six degrees of freedom (6DOF) control using the new Oculus Insight inside-out tracking system.
Quest is going to be launching in the spring of next year for $399. We’ve been hands-on with it at Connect this year so expect a full rundown of the experience later today.
Every time a new piece of virtual reality (VR) technology is revealed, a horror experience is offered alongside it. As if the promise of heightened jump scares hasn’t waned over the last five years, Oculus Connect 5’s debut of the final Santa Cruz hardware – now known as Oculus Quest – comes complete with its own haunted house courtesy of Turtle Rock Studios.
The sequel to 2017’s ‘fear and phobia’ experience retreads familiar ground. The sequence available at Oculus Connect 5 begins with the player standing in a clearing by a wood, tasked with finding your missing younger sister. As you walk along a pathway and approach a house, a few simple clues tell you you’re heading in the right direction, while some boundaries trigger events that inform you it’s not going to be a simple case of hide-and-seek.
A later sequence has you explore a woodshed, in which nasty things and apparitions are designed to halt your progress. The phobia that this sequence is excited to push the boundaries of is arachnophobia: beginning with a small spider that jumps on to your hand there’s soon floods of them all over the floor, giant ones reaching through walls at you and swinging from the ceiling literally straight into your face. Yet all the while, all you want is to find a key.
The biggest issue here is that the design of the experience still relies on players moving beyond the boundaries of the demonstration area. Oculus Quest allows you to freely move and walk within an experience unlike any other VR device out there, so why are we still being constrained by analogue sticks for locomotion? While the demonstration build of Face Your Fears 2 was perfectly adequate for showcasing a lowbrow scare sequence in VR, it seems to somewhat fall short of expectations for a totally wireless 6 DoF head-mounted display (HMD).
Essentially, Face Your Fears 2 is hamstrung by the last two years of VR design. It’s built for a VR device that’s more limited than Oculus Quest, and uses the benefits that the new hardware adds in a purely superficial way: you can move freely, but the design if the videogame completely ignores that possibility. The additional comfort Oculus Quests offers is still welcome of course, but whether that alone is worth a $399 (USD) upgrade is definitely a matter for debate.
The demonstration build ends once you’ve faced the seemingly-endless aggression of spiders and manager to unlock the door to the house with the key you acquired along the way. So while Face Your Fears 2 presents a haunted house experience for Oculus Quest, we haven’t yet been given the chance to step inside. That, it seems, will have to wait until the device launches in Spring 2019.
The sequel to 2017’s ‘fear and phobia’ experience retreads familiar ground. The sequence available at Oculus Connect 5 begins with the player standing in a clearing by a wood, tasked with finding your missing younger sister. As you walk along a pathway and approach a house, a few simple clues tell you you’re heading in the right direction, while some boundaries trigger events that inform you it’s not going to be a simple case of hide-and-seek.
Essentially, Face Your Fears 2 is hamstrung by the last two years of VR design. It’s built for a VR device that’s more limited than Oculus Quest, and uses the benefits that the new hardware adds in a purely superficial way: you can move freely, but the design if the videogame completely ignores that possibility. The additional comfort Oculus Quests offers is still welcome of course, but whether that alone is worth a $399 (USD) upgrade is definitely a matter for debate.