The Oculus Connect 5 Keynote event yesterday was an opportunity to remotely attend a new product announcement from the comfort of your VR headset, rather than watch on your monitor or phone, which is what I did. There was a lot of banter in the virtual auditorium and the expression Oculus was trying to make meme-worthy was “WHOA!” (see the promo video below for the new product announcement).

The highlight is the announcement of the Oculus Quest, a wireless, self-contained VR Gaming system, to be available to the public Spring 2019, for suggested retail price of $399. This will be the first fully operational VR system that is free-standing with no connection via wires to a computer station, has two hand-operated controllers, and full 6DoF (degrees of freedom).

There is no other system currently offered with these three features; which was announced by Mark Zuckerberg as the standards that must be met for a VR device, particularly to get to the goal of 1 billion users, and mainstream acceptance of the use of VR.

According to the official site announcements, Oculus Quest includes the same optics as Oculus Go, while incorporating an adjustable IPD slider like Rift for increased comfort. The new hardware uses 1600×1440 panels for each lens.

The built-in audio first seen in the Go works much as in the Go, apparently with improved bass.

The CPU and system design runs on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 mobile chip set.

The Quest will also have 50 titles of fully developed apps (read here: Games) ready at launch.

The Oculus Go (which was sold originally for $299 for the 32K model – no price adjustments were announced) will remain as the “entry level device”, with improvements to the optics yet still limited by 3DoF and a single, simple “point and click” based hand controller. The Oculus Rift, with the cable attaching the HMD to a computer with a gaming-strength GPU will still be in the lineup, for those wanting the complex graphic-intensive experiences (games, as mentioned from the stage).

The 6DoF is supported through a new system called Oculus Insight, which uses four external sensors to map the external environment via inside-out tracking and manages complexities such as reflective floors and walls for additional safety. The sensors are not placed as a stereo pair of cameras, as on other HMDs (head mounted displays), but creates a LiDAR like point cloud to build a model of the environment.

Room scale seems to be no problem for the new system: at the event they had created a huge arena-style area (over 4,000 square feet) for play to try out the ability to break the boundaries of room scale that both the older Oculus Rift and Valve’s Vive are bound by.

Other announcements were compressed into quick demos of a full, in-VR development environment, more life-like avatars in VR, and improvements to the Oculus store (“you will be able to purchase games and have them uploaded directly to your device from your phone!”).

There was no mention of AR at all, no mixed reality, and no talk about cameras that take pics or integrating Instagram or other real-world apps. This was completely devoted to VR, and the conclusion that VR can become a place of connection to remove the issues of distance, rather than making VR a place to isolate. Multiplayer games and cozy post-mid 20th century California-lifestyle homes for friends to gather in VR were the visuals from Connect 5 so far. More may come for social media, education and business as the conference and development continues, I’ll put on the Go and watch for more over the next few days.