Oculus Rift is Out of Stock All Over the Web, Suggesting ‘Rift S’ is Near

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It could be the Rift S, and the only thing that seems odd about the timing is that Oculus is getting ready for the ‘Oculus Quest’ launch, and to do anything that would remove attention from that would be odd.

The Quest is a completely stand-alone headset (based on an Android derivative) while the Rift S is rumored to be the same sort of screen/lens/inside out tracking, but with a wire to hook up to a PC. The screen resolution should be similar to the Odyssey Plus, and because it uses a lot of similar parts to the Quest might be a nice and competitive price for Rift owners looking for a mid-life upgrade. We’ll see soon I guess. :vr:

Oculus Rift S PC VR Headset Set For GDC 2019 Reveal

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I guess I’ll be buying a new Rift then! :sunglasses:

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For flight sims I’d really love a wider Field of View than the 95’ we have now. I think it would make a huge difference and worth a ‘next step’ in headsets.

I don’t really want to go the Pimax 5+ route (scared of the support), so waiting to see what the S looks like in specs (I’m expecting it to be similar specs on screen/lens to the Oculus Go but would like to be wrong) and then perhaps any mythical Valve next headset or WMR future thing (if they still do them).

So… That will put the Rift S at approximately the same visual quality as the Samsung O+, right?

That’s the rumor. The internal struggle at Facebook was if the Rift should go up-market on the PC and be more expensive but try newer/experimental features to push the tech forward or alternatively try to go more mass market and have a really low price with a refinement of what we have today. The low price people from Facebook seem to have won, so the S is expected to be a very similar SKU to the internals of the Oculus Quest, but without a local snapdragon processor running it and a HDMI decoder to the PC instead.

It will have better visuals than a Rift, but the question will be (a lot like the O+) is if it will be worth clearly upgrading to or not. Facebook save a bunch on manufacturing because of the share parts with the Quest (that they see the real future in, i.e. truly mobile) and because they are doing away with the sensor cameras and using inside-out tracking like the O+.

Maybe a $299 price-point, ballpark? :slight_smile:

Well, for someone like me, who

  • lives in Germany, so no Samsung O+ in stores here
  • doesn’t have any VR device yet

it might be worth it, especially if it is below 300€

…but since I don’t have a new PC yet I can wait. With my current PC VR doesn’t work.

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A wider FOV would certainly be nice, but for me, having a headset with the O+’s resolution, with no need for base stations, with Oculus Touch type controllers, similar comfort, reduced reflections/God Rays and maybe a larger sweet spot, all on the Oculus platform would be worth the upgrade to me personally.

With Facebook wanting to sell to the masses rather than a smaller group (that would be us), then I guess we have to take what we can get. Economics wins at the end of the day.

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I want to read labels. Read labels and spot aircraft.

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Yep.
I tried the Oculus Rift at a friend’s house, and while it was an awesome feeling to fly the plane, I missed being able to read the instruments and generally, you know, see stuff.

This.

I can pretty much read labels with my first gen Odyssey.

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In the recent Alert 5 podcast, @wags said his initial impression of the Pimax 5k+ was that it was the first headset he could just read every label and control in cockpit. That would be so nice. So many pixels to push around though, that it would take some real decent VR optimizations in the DCS engine to get decent framerates…

I think even the 4k TV crowd want some change in DCS for this, as in some sort of better solution for general spotting, even if not especially for VR.

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Spotting aircraft should be easy enough to to improve for VR users. Just modifying the labels.lua file to only place a gray dot over the unit makes things a lot better. If ED would put the labels layer outside the cockpit then we are going a long way towards getting the problem solved even with existing hardware. The next step would be to make this labels layer an automatic thing vor VR users, and acceptable for online play - ie the parameters could be hard coded by ED to an acceptable level.

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VR users should be given more control over the level of zoom available to them. It is certainly not a cheat so long as the range never exceeds what is currently available in 2D. IL2 became a much more playable sim once a 3rd party moded a strengthened zoom.

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