Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Back in January, we received a small monetary bonus, so I decided, Hey, what the hell, I’m gonna try one of these new-fangled VR gaming headsets.

Being a wearer of spectacles, though, I had concerns. There was a chance they simply wouldn’t work for me, so I tried one at the mall, watched YouTube videos, read many reviews, browsed the forums, and carefully parsed return policies. Weighing pros and cons, I made a decision and bought one. It was on backorder, but I wasn’t in a hurry.

That was in January.

Then the world fell down, and I forgot all about it.

In April, we’d been in lockdown for six weeks when a package arrived. As I opened it, I saw it was my Oculus Quest. My quarantine complaints dissolved into pixelated dust.

My wife took one look at the thing, laughed, and bid me adieu, knowing she wouldn’t see me for at least a week while I explored a series of strange new (virtual) worlds.

First things first. Yes, you can wear your glasses, and in fact you need to wear your glasses. They must be smaller than the 142x50mm size limit, though. No Charles Nelson Reilly glasses allowed. The Quest has a “glasses spacer” that fits inside the viewport, giving you a bit more room between your specs and the headset’s Fresnel lenses, saving both from contact and damage. I’d seen this spacer demonstrated on YouTube, but it was the first thing I checked, and there was no problem.

The Quest is wireless (unless you use the Link to connect to a PC for higher-end games). It connects directly to your WiFi, and will interact with apps for phone and tablet. You can browse the internet, watch films, explore 360° views of the world, and play an ever-growing selection of games. It comes with two wireless hand-held controllers with which you manipulate objects in the virtual realm. They can act as pointers, light sabers, firearms, and weirdly disembodied, surrogate hands, depending on the application, and interacting with the buttons and joysticks is, for the most part, quite intuitive.

I had expected that my favorite games would be first-person shooters, as that’s what I gravitate toward on gaming consoles. My second choice would probably be puzzle games like The Room VR, a Myst-like game where you explore a series of rooms to uncover secrets and progress toward a goal. As for the the rhythm/music beat games, where you interact with oncoming objects in time to a musical playlist, I didn’t look forward to those as they never piqued my interest in console play.

It was a huge surprise, therefore, when I found my order of enjoyment to be the complete reverse. Shooters? Meh. Puzzle games. Nice. But the music/rhythm games? I just can’t get enough of them. I’m in my sixties, now, and though I work out on a semi-regular basis, it’s mostly on the treadmill, the elliptical, and some free weights. These rhythm games provide me with an interesting and engaging workout for my upper body and core as I slice, smack, and evade everything they throw at me (at least on the lower difficulty setting). Lately, I’ve been spending up to an hour each day, working out/playing one or more of these games, quitting only when my arms are too tired or I’m sweating so much that I can’t see through my fogged-up lenses.

Additional enjoyment and wonder came from experiences I hadn’t even thought about when I made my purchase. Since the Quest arrived, I’ve swum the Great Barrier Reef, explored Notre Dame (before and, sadly, after the fire), climbed Everest, and seen Earth from the International Space Station (boy, manipulating that robotic arm is a challenge). 

Sadly, the one game I really wanted to play (Half-Life: Alyx) is unavailable to me. Most Oculus games are downloaded onto and executed by the headset itself, but some, like Half-Life: Alyx, are too beefy for the Quest’s processors, so you run them on a PC and connect it to your VR headset with a cable. The PC does the heavy lifting, and the headset handles the display and interface. Alas, while the Quest was up for it, my PC wasn’t, as it did not have the requisite video processing power. So for now, Alyx is out of my reach.

Is there anything wrong/bad/less-than-perfect about the Quest? 

Sure there is.

The battery life isn’t the greatest, lasting only a few hours before the charge runs down. You can plug it in and play whilst it charges, but this is only acceptable for more sedate games. I definitely would not recommend wired-up-play for the more kinetic action genres.

While the more kinetic action games are definitely “standing mode” only, a lot of others have a “seated mode” option. I used this in The Room VR, because frankly, standing for hours while I figured out the intricate puzzles was hell on my arches. Seated mode isn’t perfect, though, as there’s still a lot of reaching and craning one’s neck to see objects from every angle.

Also, the pixel resolution isn’t what you’re used to on a console or PC. For all its amazing capability, this platform is still very much in its infancy, and the hardware has limitations. While consoles are preparing for 4K resolution, VR headsets like the Quest sometimes struggle to achieve even SD quality. Environments are often little more than filled-in wireframes, though game designers have often stylized everything to present this as an aesthetic rather than a constraint, which helps.

And then there’s the “flying controller” issue. Each handheld controller uses an AA battery, and on the more energetic games like Beat Saber, where you slash at oncoming cubes with a light saber, all to the beat of a techno-pop soundtrack, one of my sabers would sometimes just fly off into the ethereal void. A second later, the tracker would reacquire the controller and it’d be back in my hand, but by then my perfect score combo was ruined. Going to the forums and Reddit, I found scores of others who experienced this same issue, but no one (including Oculus) knew what it was or why it was happening. Until I found one guy who sussed it out. On energetic swings of the controller, the G-force would make the AA battery slide forward onto its spring and briefly lose contact with the back end, breaking the circuit. The controller lost power for a split second, but long enough to send the “saber” flying off on its last-known trajectory. His solution was to wrap a small rubber band around each AA battery. The rubber pressed against the sides of the compartment, the battery didn’t slide, and tada! no more “flying controller” issues. Low-tech and hi-tech together.

As pleased as I am with my Oculus Quest, I know it is not for everyone. Whether it’s the lack of high resolution, the sense of vertigo you can get when the virtual floor drops out, or just the pressure of wearing the headset (which, I must say, is surprisingly comfortable), this just won’t click for some people.

But then, some people don’t like ice cream. Go figger.

Onward.

k