Oculus Rift S 2??

Ndwolfy780 · January 23, 2020

So obviously with new release of the Quest all of the attention oculus has, has primarily been towards it and its futher development. Which is quite understandable. However what I want to know is what they plan to do with the Rift S. To my knowldge the Rift S is still better than the Quest in every way other than its tethered to a PC and has a worse display. And its that last advantage the Quest has thats got me wondering what they will do with the Rift S. As to me it doesnt make sense that the Quest (which has to have the graphics of the games it has tonned down to be able to run) have the higher resolution and OLED display. The Rift S and the Quest were released quite close together so its not like they didnt have the ability to make the Rift S with the better display and better resolution. And from what ive been told even with the lower resolution and the worse display it still looks better graphically because its able to have the full textures rather than the reduced ones on the Quest. So it just doesnt seem logical to make the Rift S with those down falls. As its just resulted in Oculus killing its own product. And with the current standing of the two being priced the same its just making things more confusing as to why Oculus would do this.

So overall what im hoping for from Oculus is that they release something like a Rift S 2 or an equivilant that simply just has the better resolution and display pannels. Or possibly even drop the prices on the current Rift S and when going to purchase one have the option for the better display. Although im not a electrical engineer or some kind of product designer it doesnt seem like it would be that hard to impliment. Esspecially seeing as they have it on the Quest which would seem like a more complex device.

trufret · January 23, 2020

I doubt you're going to see anything new from Oculus for a couple years still. If I had to guess I think it will likely be a Quest 2 as they are pushing hard on the mass market VR and have pretty much left the enthusiast space to other companies.

Rift S already felt like a rush job they farmed out to Lenovo to have something to hold over PCVR users to give them similar specs to the newer headsets while the CV1 was end of life and the Quest wasn't quite ready yet (especially for PC tether which just came out a few months ago).

The only HMDs with a noticeable resolution improvement over the current Rift S, Quest, Index, Vive Pro/Cosmos are the HP Reverb and Pimax 5K and 8K headsets.

Both of them need a top tier GPU and even struggle with those. Until mid rage GPUs with comparable performance to 1080tis or higher come out, I doubt Oculus is going to make anything of that resolution.

Ndwolfy780 · January 26, 2020

On 1/24/2020 at 5:17 AM, trufret said:

I doubt you're going to see anything new from Oculus for a couple years still. If I had to guess I think it will likely be a Quest 2 as they are pushing hard on the mass market VR and have pretty much left the enthusiast space to other companies.

Rift S already felt like a rush job they farmed out to Lenovo to have something to hold over PCVR users to give them similar specs to the newer headsets while the CV1 was end of life and the Quest wasn't quite ready yet (especially for PC tether which just came out a few months ago).

The only HMDs with a noticeable resolution improvement over the current Rift S, Quest, Index, Vive Pro/Cosmos are the HP Reverb and Pimax 5K and 8K headsets.

Both of them need a top tier GPU and even struggle with those. Until mid rage GPUs with comparable performance to 1080tis or higher come out, I doubt Oculus is going to make anything of that resolution.

I doubt that too. Ive done a bit of research into the Oculus link of course its in beta so still possible to change but from the looks of it yes you will be able to play all of the PC VR games using the PCs resources not its own, with the better graphics and not toned down like it is on its own. However Ive seen a major flaw in it. It uses a USB 3 data bus. Which although it is fast, it is not fast enough. Because of this the data, which is essentially a display output, that is required from the PC has to be compressed and then sent to the headset. Resulting in dropped quality. Although Oculus has done some fancy software work to make this run better and keep from the loss in visual quality, it still comes with some side effects.

It has been observed when turning your head too quickly you will see the black bars move with you before the image is loaded in for where youre facing. This is because of Oculus with their software making it so only what youre looking at is rendered, smart. However as a result as the apromentioned side effect which can be annoying when playing fast pace shooter games, or in any games with alot of head movement for that matter. There are rumors that I have heard that they are going to improve the software more so its faster and easier to get data through to the headset. One such rumor mentions that only where the wearer is looking will be full rendered, although this could work well and there would be no "noticible" down grade in visual quality theres an issue with it. The Quest does not have eye tracking. Which means that for this idea to be implimented they will have to make the spot where the image is fully rendered in the centre of the screen. This is an issue because looking around with your eyes will just feel awful and almost be like a strange kind of fish eye effect. Where the image isnt destorted, just visualy worse as it gets closer to the edges.

All of this seems like alot of work for something they could actually fix quite easily. Which is make the port on the quest a thunderbot 3 port. not just a USB C port. Same plug but diffrent protocalls. Thunderbolt 3 is a far superior protocol and supports displayport. Which then could be used as the Oculus link and would be much easier to software impliment. As it could be used as a regular PC tethered headset. meaning all the funky software they have that doesnt rendered things that arent being looked at and ect would not be needed. As thunderbolt 3 would be able to keep up with the required bandwith to act as if it was just a regular VR headset and fix all the issues presented using the USB 3 data bus.

Although yes this solution does involve the need for a new release of the headset for the better chip to be used. I personally dont feel as if this would be that difficult to have intoduced. For example all Quest that are bought from what ever date they impliment it will have the new thunderbolt 3 chip. And for all of those who bought the Quest before the upgraded chip, a sysetem could be intoduced to have their headset sent in and have the chip upgraded. Or better yet. Send the required chip to participating computer stores to have it swapped there.