Oculus Quest 2 revealed with ‘almost 4K’ screen and doubled performance

Facebook have accidentally released some trailers and informational videos for a follow up to their standalone Oculus Quest VR headset. A pair of videos were published on Facebook Blueprint today, confirming the headset ahead of a presumed announcement as Facebook Connect on Wednesday 16th September.

While taken down soon after, the videos naturally made their way to YouTube soon after:

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It promises to be a major step forward for the platform, with a reduced weight and size and new soft touch strap to make it easier to wear and use for extended periods of time. There will be over 50% more pixels in the screens than the Quest 1, at ‘almost 4K’ or nearly 2K per eye. That will be powered by a new Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 with 6GB RAM to double the performance over the original Quest. There’s also an optional 256GB of built-in storage.

We’ll have to wait until Wednesday for further details (unless more information leaks) about the pricing and release date.

As enticing as all of that is, for the industry leading standalone VR platform, Facebook and Oculus have recently drawn flak for an upcoming service change that will require users to login with a Facebook account in order to use their headsets. That will initially be for new devices registered from this October, and will eventually be rolled back to all existing headsets by 2023, locking off devices from the Oculus ecosystem after that point if they are not attached.

This has drawn the attention of German regulators, who believe it falls foul of GDPR’s ban on “coupling” which prevents a contract, such as an EULA, from being tied to the sharing of personal data. Even if not against the privacy law, it’s still a way that Facebook is folding Oculus into the greater whole of the company and letting it connect the dots on even more user data.

Source: Facebook Blueprint via Eurogamer, Ars Technica

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