Review: Oculus Go

What's the first truly mainstream virtual-reality device? Is it the first one that millions of people can get for free or close to it, like the Google Cardboard? Is it the one with the first glimmer of name recognition, like the Oculus Rift? Is it the one that can run off a smartphone people already have, like the Daydream View (Google Pixel) or the Samsung Gear VR (Samsung Note)? Is it the one that gives the brawniest in-home experience at the brawniest price point, like the HTC Vive Pro?

Or is it none of those? What if what VR needs to finally vault out of the realm of the curio and into wide usage isn’t lightness or power, but convenience? Something self-contained, with all the necessary processing and sensors and display components built in so you don't need to slap your phone into it or connect it to a PC or game console—but also wireless, so you can throw it in your bag and use it anywhere? Something with an on/off switch that just powers up and works? Something that you can easily remove and hand to a friend?

That’s the thinking behind so-called “standalone” headsets, which ditch cables and satellite devices in favor of ease of use. The Oculus Go, which goes on sale today starting at $199, is the first of its category, though not the last. Lenovo’s Mirage Solo, which works on Google’s Daydream virtual reality platform, is available on Friday starting at $399, with other standalones following later this year.

However when compared to these other devices, Oculus and Facebook’s gamble becomes clear: this isn’t a full-court press, it’s an undercut. With a cost (and capability) markedly less than its competitors’, the Oculus Go isn’t trying to blow anyone out of the water—it’s trying to cajole you into seeing VR as easy, affordable, magical entertainment.

Of the major VR manufacturers, Oculus more than any understands the power of retail design. Unboxing the Rift felt like opening an Apple device—solid material, inventive closures, any cables and adapters nestled smartly and surreptitiously in their surroundings. The headset itself was designed with intuitive comfort in mind, as were its controllers. This was a product that not only looked good, it felt good.

The Go continues that tradition. It’s not quite as friendly looking as the Rift—its featureless gray plastic feels like Kafka Moderne, which the iridescent gray faceplate and gray fabric strap do little to dispel—but finds its way onto your face quickly, thanks to a quick and flawless setup process. (While the Rift’s setup process was clear enough, most users by now are familiar with the woes of an ill-timed GPU update or a seemingly random USB port failure.) Its initial power-up also broaches not-quite-standalone territory; you’ll need Oculus’ smartphone app to set up the headset, as well as to connect the Go to any wireless network for the first time.

While there’s a headphone jack near the micro-USB charging port on the headset’s left side, speakers embedded in the headset direct sound toward your ear. It's audible, if not clearly so, to people nearby, and it’s not as immersive as the Rift’s fold-down headphones, but it works better than you’d think—and certainly removes one of the most annoying parts about taking off a headset for someone else to try. (Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone full Tommy-Davidson-in-Booty-Call with a headphone cable while in VR.)

At just over a pound—my kitchen scale clocked it at 16.7 ounces—the Go is lighter than a phone-laden Gear VR, and far more comfortable: its “facial interface” liner is cushier, and its top strap keeps it so stably on your head that I was able to loosen the side straps enough to avoid the telltale raccoon marks around my eyes and cheeks. An included extra spacer can be placed between the facial liner and the headset to create room for eyeglasses, something I appreciated early mornings and late nights, before I'd put my contacts in. There's one significant design demerit, though: The top strap anchors to rest of the strap only by a smallish bit of velcro, which has an annoying habit of pulling away when I put the headset on.

The first thing you notice when you turn on the Go and select a home environment—a 360-degree photo that serves as backdrop for the rest of the user menus—is "wow that display looks good." It's not just better than a Samsung phone looks in a Gear VR; it's better than the Rift's display as well. Part of that is the display itself: Rather than utilize the same OLED screens as the Rift, the Go employs a fast-switch LCD, which helps fill in the spaces between the pixels a bit and mitigates the famed/dreaded "screen door effect." There's also a new generation of the Fresnel lenses that the Rift used, with Oculus claiming that the new lenses reduce "god rays," the light dispersion effect that can occur in high-contrast scenes. And in my week of testing, I wasn't bothered by either phenomenon—though using the Go with my back to a window on a bright day did allow light to leak in. So ... don't do that.

After a quick tutorial on how to use the single bundled hand controller, the Go sets you free to explore and install any apps or games that catch your eye. All Gear VR titles are compatible with the Go; that means more than 1,000 are available in the Oculus Store on day one, with more than 100 that are either brand new or, in Oculus' words, "substantially improved." How many you can fit into the 32GB version of the Go remains to be seen—titles range from less than 100MB up to more than a gig, but there's no way to check your storage at a glance. According to an Oculus spokesperson, users will get a notification in the headset when their free space dips below 2GB, and then again at 500MB. (Don't worry; I have 27 things installed at the moment, and I'm still notification-free. If you can't live without downloading multiple movies, though, your fileage may vary.)

What those games and apps encompass is further proof of the Go's particular mission. When Oculus first unveiled the device last year, its "welcome, casual users!" messaging was already in place in an introductory blog post: "It’s awesome for watching movies or concerts, playing games, or just hanging out with your friends in VR." Each of those is represented in a different part of the headset's launch-window rollout. Oculus TV lets users bring their streaming apps into VR and watch them together; Netflix and Hulu already made popular apps for the company, but they'll be joined by Showtime and others, with ESPN+ coming to the platform later this year. Oculus Venues does the same for comedy shows, sporting events, concerts, and other live spectacles.

But while you'll find lots to do and see, the Go offers precious little of the deep social experiences have captivated PC VR users. The Go's best new games, like Anshar Online and tabletop title Catan VR, offer networked play, but its dedicated social offerings are limited to relatively lightweight apps like vTime and Altspace. "Hanging out with your friends" seems to refer only to Oculus TV and the company's Rooms app, which lets you share a space with your existing FWH (friends with headsets). With the Go, sharing is meant for people outside the headset. You can take photos and record videos from inside the headset, even livestream your VR, and you can post all of it—you'd just better want it on Facebook, because as of now that's the only place you can post it.

That Facebook-centrism, while understandable given Oculus' parent company, still remains one of the Go's two glaring issues. The other is that like the Gear VR, it only tracks your rotations, not your motion in three-dimensional space. You can spin and nod and tilt to your heart's content, but being confined to so-called "three degrees of freedom" means that you can't lean over to inspect something more closely, or duck out of the way of an incoming virtual object. And since the same goes for its single controller, it also means that you can't bring your hands into VR for natural gestural controls. Instead, the controller functions like a glorified laser pointer—good for at what it does, just not transformative. (I'll pause here to give lobbyists from Big Laser Pointer a chance to flood my mentions.)

Yet, it's all in perfect keeping with the device's strategy. The Go is meant to be simple, and it's meant to be inexpensive. But most importantly, it's meant to be immersive while still being easy. Easy equals fun, which equals customers, which equals the continued growth of VR—an important consideration for the company that's arguably sunken more money into the technology than any other.

Whether the Go is the device that's finally going to rocket VR out of early-adopter orbit and make it a mass technology remains to be seen. Oculus has a more ambitious, fully-tracked standalone device in the works; "Santa Cruz," as the prototype is known, gets much closer to the performance of a first-generation PC-connected VR headset like the Rift, including full positional tracking. But Santa Cruz has no date, and the Go is here now. It's comfortable, it boasts a huge software library, and it comes from a company that has polished its user experience to a fine sheen. And at a shade less than $200, it's as damn fine a stopgap as you can imagine.