Oculus Go 64GB - Standalone Virtual Reality Headset

As an original Kickstarter backer and regular Rift user I'm impressed with this device and I love that we are finally at a place where something like this is a reality for an entry price of just £200/$200. There are some issues and had it cost much more than this I'd certainly be knocking a star off but at this price point they are sensible tradeoffs that ultimately don't take much away form the experience. I'll try and keep this concise but there's so much to talk about here. There has been little marketing for this in the UK and in fact, right now you will get a US only USB charger in the box (these are ten a penny so shouldn't be a major problem). The setup is quick and simple. You will need to pair it with an iOS or Android smartphone, at least to get going, but once you're connected to wi-fi you can go to town. I won't go into detail about the technical aspects since this has been covered elsewhere but I think a little perspective is in order. At £200-250 it’s still a considered purchase but at the end of the day this is a complete, standalone VR platform! Sit anywhere, lay in bed, lounge outside, travel and take it everywhere. The fact it’s untethered can not be understated. Sure it lacks positional tracking but until an efficient standard is found it’s a necessary tradeoff. It’s primarily aimed at sit down experiences, for relaxing more so than flailing about wildly. I’ve seen people compare it to a games console or a complete PC based Rift/Vive setup. This is wholly unfair and missing the point of this. No one compares mobile gaming with console gaming but it’s a similar situation here. It’s not meant to replace your console or PC for gaming but what it does is provide a compelling alternative VR platform. That’s not to say it won’t have great games, some of the games I’ve played so far are really good fun - Drop Dead is a zombie shooter that reminds me of the House of the Dead series and a great showpiece for the platform. Now where this thing really shines is as a media player. I was laying in bed watching my favourite TV show on Netflix on a giant floating screen just a few feet in front of me. It really is like your own personal cinema and right now probably the system’s killer app. Now having been in VR for a few years now I’ve obviously tried video playback before but it’s always felt awkward and a bit weird, now however, with no wires to contend with I can curl up on the sofa and watch in a really relaxed way. Battery life is certainly an issue here, but on a full charge you should get 2 - 2.5 hours and if you plug this into a USB battery pack you can extend this a lot further. It’s also a little weighty on the face but adjustment of the straps should get you in a good place. It’s still early days for VR and this is a really big step in the right direction. Of course generations down the line features will be added, it’s only natural, but if you want to get in on the ground floor and take a ride on the elevator of innovation this is definitely for you. The beauty here is its simplicity. You don’t need any extra equipment apart from what’s in the box and a smartphone to setup. With the impressive and smart looking hardware, a myriad of games, apps and experiences and the backing of Oculus and Facebook this is a 5 star product. Sure there are a couple of small issues but right now, this is where we are and where we are is pretty sweet.

**The four stars in this review is for the actual product. Do not buy this item at the current price as it is inflated and you can buy directly from Oculus for far cheaper!** As for the Oculus Go, I love it. There are a few niggles, that stop it from being five stars, but I’ll come on to them shortly. When it comes to VR, I’ve owned both the PlayStation VR and two versions of the Gear VR. I’ve used them mostly for watching Netflix and YouTube. I love how these headsets make it feel like you’re watching on a big screen! Prior to getting the Go, I was using the Gear VR, but I’m due to upgrade and therefore part-ex my Samsung phone and intend to return to an iPhone. Therefore I didn’t want to be without a vr option. My PC isn’t powerful enough for the rift, so I had to look into other options. I was really glad to see the Go announced and love that, except for initial setup, it is ‘Untethered’. The screen is much better than the gear and from YouTube videos, it appears also better than the current rift. Obviously, it’s not as advanced as the rift, in that you can’t move around the screen, you can just turn around on the spot. The negatives for me are the battery life, only about 2.5 hours. Also, at the moment, the Go will also switch on when charging, but this could and hopefully will be rectified in an update. It can also take a while to adjust the straps to make this comfortable for you. The last negative for me is that you only get a charging plug if you are in the US. I really don’t know why! Don’t let the negatives put you off though! The positives for this VR headset far outweighs the negatives. If you found this review helpful, can you please help me by clicking on the helpful button. Thanks

This is good to the appoint of entry level in to (VR) first off it’s very comfortable and light, the resolution it’s pretty much same as the rift, the FOV is a bit less than the rift. Easy to set up you just need a smartphone that can use the Oculus App. The audio is amazing and I recommend getting earphones as people can still hear your audio. Plenty off apps, just the games are mobile games not PC games as you need Rift for PC VR games. I just can’t wait for more updates... the only real bad thing is the battery life as it last about two hours. Just a note it’s priced at £199 for 32gb and £249 for 64gb on the oculus site.

Top deal. Very pleased

Oculus Go es digamos, un headset mid/high-range, es decir, un punto más arriba de la media, superando las expectativas dado sus especificaciones. Es un headset independiente y de calidad, claramente no es un Rift o un HTC vive pero no necesitas una PC gamer para poder utilizar el headset. Como su nombre lo dice “Go” es para llevártelo a donde quieras y usarlo cuando quieras, es claramente una revolución de VR para poder hacerlo masivo, para su precio está excelente, ahora sin duda alguna abrirá un mercado nuevo para el mundo de la realidad virtual. La resolución digamos que está en un punto medio, para este precio está bien pero quizás si valdría la pena pagar un poco más para tener una mejor resolución, sin embargo, es buena para todo lo que conlleva un producto así. Puntos a favor: - Puedes configurar el Oculus Go sin un teléfono. Mantenga presionado el control de volumen hacia arriba / abajo y se abrirá un menú de configuración. - Independiente y sin cables molestos, es decir, no necesitas una PC poderosa para usarlo, simplemente póntelo y a disfrutar - Diseño moderno y minimalista con materiales de construcción de calidad - Está basado en Gear VR y ya cuenta con un mercado, ya existen muchas aplicaciones para este. - ALVR (más sobre esto abajo) extiende las capacidades. MUY RECOMENDADO. - Cuenta con la aplicación de Netflix para disfrutar todo el contenido como si estuvieras en el cine - Abajo menciono el problema del calentamiento, el punto a favor es que tiene un apagado automático cuando excede cierta temperatura. Puntos en contra: - La batería sin duda es su punto más débil con una duración de 2 hrs para Gaming y 2:30 hrs para películas y contenido multimedia. - NO tiene capacidad para expandir la memoria - 3 grados de libertad (es un headset más que nada para multimedia y algunos que otros juegos) - El calentamiento es un problema y aunque es de esperarse, se calienta muy rápido, hay que tener cuidado con el sobre uso de este. Oculus Go + ALVR ALVR es una pantalla de VR remota, es de código abierto (open source) para Gear VR y Oculus Go. Con él, puedes jugar juegos de SteamVR en tu headset. ALVR como menciono, te permite jugar los juegos de Steam VR haciendo streaming desde tu PC a tu Oculus Go, ojo: debes tener una PC buena para esto y opcionalmente, aunque recomendable, un control de Xbox One con bluetooth.

Good

this is a must have gadget if you are into watching movies surfing web or even playing light games in a huge screen screen/lenses are crystal clear

My interested in VR started when I walked past a local electronics store and noticed the Samsung Gear VR headset on display. When I put it on I was blown away! But being in the Apple ecosystem I didn’t have a Samsung smartphone, and the idea of buying one just for this purpose was surplus to requirements. Also, the idea of buying a VR headset that has cables connected to a PC or Playstation has never appealed to me. So instead, I opted to use my iPhone 6s in a rather cheap headset - even though I was fully aware this wasn’t the best VR experience available. Even still, I found the VR experience reasonably impressive, or so I thought. Then along comes the Oculus Go. Finally… a VR headset that is self-contained, comfortable to wear, and doesn’t require cable connections to any fancy graphic cards and PCs. This ticked all the boxes and was what I’d been waiting for! So after reading a number of product reviews, I decided to get it. I tried to kept my expectations low (even though I was excited inside!) as this sometimes doesn’t help me when I’m eagerly awaiting for a snazzy new product to arrive. My main wish, however, was that I wanted it to be a noticeable step up from my iPhone VR experience. So when it arrived I excitedly unboxed it and set it up. I decided to give myself a few days to use it, as a fair assessment, before writing this review. My first impressions is that it is solidly built and well made. It feels very comfortable to put on. The weight of the headset is about right, as expected. Of course, it would be nice if it was lighter, but it’s comfortable enough to wear. After turning it on and seeing the display screen for the first time I immediate thought a number of things. The resolution is good, although didn’t appear quite as sharp as I anticipated, but more on that later. The sense of emersion, however, what a real improvement! For the first time, I actually felt like I was there… rather than feeling like a distant spectator with narrow vision as per my smartphone-based system. This is because it has a wide field of view of approx 100 degrees (although not published) vs 60 degrees with my smartphone-based headset. Combined with the 72Hz refresh rate which adds to the clarity of movement this also undoubtedly contributes to the sense of emersion. The Oculus Go comes with it’s own controller. I initially thought having to use a controller would detract from the VR experience, but I was wrong. It makes menu selection, system navigation and video scrubbing, etc, so much easier than the “move your head to the selection on the screen, and wait to confirm” concept. And using it throughout the VR experience feels quite natural, and surprisingly didn't require any learning curve to use it. Now, on the resolution side of things. When I read the specs on the Oculus Go has a screen resolution of 2560 x 1440 (1280 x 1440 per eye) I was excited! Comparing this to the screen resolution of 1334 x 750 (667 x 750 per eye) on my iPhone 6s - I calculated the Oculus Go has 4 times the amount of pixels. So when I first turned on the Oculus Go I was expecting to see a visually crisp sharp 4k display. But it didn’t seem like this. It’s a great image, very clear and detailed, and better than the resolution on my iPhone 6s… but it’s not like watching the display on a 4k television. It’s hard to describe, but the pixel edges are not as crisp as I imagined they would be. Now I do understand resolution is a subjective thing. And there are other factors involved, as in the so-called “screen door” effect which is caused by the distance between the pixel elements. With the built-in optical lenses precisely tuned to allow our eyes to focus on visual content which is physically very close to the display panel, this is a co-incidental effect. (Although the Oculus Go has been reported as having the least noticeable screen-door effect across the range of VR headset devices on the market). But does this detract from my immersive VR experience? Usually no, but it depends on the quality of content being shown. Low resolution picture and video content on the VR headset looks horrible! However, high resolution pictures and 4k video content looks amazing! The built-in speakers are reasonably good. Before it arrived I did pre-anticipate the built-in speakers would be low quality, but I’m pleasantly surprised with the sound quality. They are suitable for general occasions - but obviously not for privacy! There were a number of occasions I did forget that the sound was leaking to the outside world for all to hear. Slightly embarrassing, to say the least. But of course it is best to plug in a quality set of headphones for optimised sound quality. The downside is that is doesn’t support bluetooth headphones so it won’t connect to my Apple AirPods. I could use a bluetooth audio transmitter with a 3.5mm headphone jack, but it would ideally need to be mounted onto the headset, and can’t guarantee the audio quality it would transmit. On the con side, the limited amount of onboard memory means it’s very easy to fill up particularly when transferring a number of 4k video files across onto the device, and I’m speaking from experience here. But using a video player that streams content from the PC (over the wifi network) or cloud storage avoids this limitation. The supported software on the Mac that allow file transfers is sometimes buggy, but it works. It’s a real shame that the device doesn’t have a built-in SD card reader. Also, I find the battery runs down quite quickly, although I have been spending a fair amount of time on it since it arrived. I’m like a boy with a new toy, as they say. I probably get 2.5 hours of play from a full charge, which annoyingly takes the same amount of time to charge it. I haven’t got too much into the Oculus Store software yet, but there seems to be a reasonable amount of apps and content available. And no doubt the number of apps will grow over time. All in all - I love it! Which is why I give it a 5 star rating, otherwise it would be a more accurate 4.5 stars (if this was possible to do on Amazon). The pure simplicity of switching it on and it’s ready to go… no cables and no smartphone to worry about, and the share experience of emersion it gives - it’s totally worth it in my opinion. The main question I had - is the Oculus Go a definite improvement over from my previous smartphone-based VR experience? Most definitely yes! But even more so, it’s vastly superior! Now that I've experienced VR this good, there's no turning back! (unless you're watching a 360 degree video of course!) Important Note: As mentioned in the Oculus Go care page it’s important to keep the lenses away from direct sunlight when the device is not in use as it can cause sun damage on the inside screen panel. You can cover it accordingly, but what I do is place the card that tells you where to download the app over the lenses. It’s provided in the original box and fits perfectly over the lenses. I nearly threw it away. So glad I didn’t.

im very happy with it, very easy to setup easy to put your movies in, viewing is great can wear with your glasses which i do overall i am very happy with this purchase