I recently picked up an Oculus Quest 2, I am a pretty big VR mark but wanted to wait until PC-centric headsets had bumped up another level of resolution and/or FOV. Even though the Quest 2 has been out a while now I still planned on skipping it for the resolution alone. The screen-door effect on my aging CV1 was driving me crazy but it didn’t feel like the Quest 2 was enough of an upgrade to consider moving over. The thing is Oculus kept improving the headset seemingly every quarter suggesting that they planned on selling the Quest 2 for a while. I think the best products are those that get consistent updates both firmware and software so on a whim I went out and grabbed the Quest 2 and thus far I’m really impressed.
The screen-door is much improved, it’s not perfect but it’s a huge step up from the CV1. The FOV isn’t great but I can overlook that for all the other features.
- No more external cameras, no need for active USB3 cables which were a PITA
- Lots of accessories, I changed my Quest 2 headstrap for a ‘halo-style’ head strap making the headset a LOT more comfortable
- Quest 2 is wireless, not only for Quest 2 titles but is also capable of streaming PCVR titles over WIFI to the headset, allowing you to use your PC software wirelessly
- Simple set-up, seated, standing, different rooms, different light in each room, it all just works. Simplicity is one of the major improvements to the software side of things when comparing against the CV1
- Easier access to curated VR content, the Quest 2 has a nice dashboard where you can quickly access new content
- As I mentioned, Oculus is updating the Quest 2 software/firmware consistently, offering new features, improvements, for free
It’s not all roses and puppy-dogs, the headset isn’t perfect but for the price it gets you access to a lot of great content for cheap, at least when comparing against legacy PC only VR. Some things I don’t like about the headset:
- The default head strap is pretty bad, not much different than the CV1 but it would be difficult to go back to the default strap after using halo-style
- battery life is not great. Wireless is nice but the headset eats battery life, luckily it was easy to add a small battery pack which also helped balance the headset a bit more
- Gigantic gap between PCVR and Quest 2 native titles, not surprising since native titles need to use less graphical options since the GPU on the headset is still a mobile processor, this is more of a note than a negative