Hello everybody. It’s here, after way too many months of taking decisions, I finally pulled out my credit card, visited Oculus store and spent my hard earn money on such a useless thing like virtual reality googles. Oculus Quest 2 to be precise.
From everyone’s favourite company which recently renamed itself from Facebook to Meta. Interestingly the product is still branded with Oculus logo and Meta is nowhere to find except the website itself.
I am very pleased with the purchase experience itself. Because the googles were in stock, it was delivered in just two days. I love to live in country where these services are available, wasn’t always the case when I was back home in Czech Republic. The VR was delivered even around lunchtime, which made my workday endless 🙂 It reminded me being a kid, when I couldn’t even fall asleep the day before Christmas Eve.
I’ve seen some reviews and impression videos of the device, but I was still surprised how well built it is. It’s still just second generations of this model. However Oculus is the OG among VR manufacturers and is responsible for majority of research in this field. The box contains main googles and two controllers. For people who use dioptric glasses there is also an extension block that will provide you a bit more space between device lenses and your own eyes. On top of that there is a rubber sleeve you can cover main foam frame. It makes glasses a bit more hygienic if you share them or host a VR party.
The Quest 2 model has minimalistic controls, you have a turn on/off button, volume rocker and I immediately felt in love in small speakers responsible for spatial audio. It’s much more comfortable than wearing headphones for easy playing. Although I am thinking that for some games in the future it might be preferable to use headphones… for immersion. Oculus supports both headphone jack and USB-C. On top of that there is a build-in microphone for social games and voice controls.
Each controller has a bumper, trigger buttons and under your thumb you’ll find A, B buttons plus 8-direction dpad. Again, nothing complicated, for most of the games you will be doing fine with just bumper + trigger combination. I still have to try a bigger game where control schema is more advanced.
I dare to say that everyone who tries the googles becomes immediately immersed and it was my experience too. Brand new for me was UI and how all menus behave. Anytime you can bring a control dock with several applications and app drawer (like the Mac’s one). Your device comes with several icons from the stock – you’ll have access to Store, Explore, Move, Oculus TV and few more.
Explore is a similar to a regular app store front – it’s basically just another opportunity to highlight new or successful items but you can find content across multiple sources – downloadable applications, videos or Labs. This is for sure a great place to start and many experiences are free to play or at least to try.
I’ll write more about software as I get more time with Oculus. There are some must-buy apps and I already have those 🙂