Oculus Rift S Announced, Here’s What the $400 Sequel Offers

Since Oculus Rift 2016’s launch, no new hardware came out of Facebook’s labs but that situation changed just now.

Check out the Oculus Rift S, the official sequel just debuted at Game Developers Conference 2019 (GDC). It’s coming this spring and costs $400, which is $50 more than the original, so let’s see what it offers.

The Oculus Rift S is a headset that brings plenty of features over from the Oculus Go and Oculus Quest standalone headsets. Most notably, it ships with the updated Oculus Touch controllers found in the Oculus Quest package.

The biggest improvement over the original Oculus Rift is the remover of plugs and wires.

The Oculus Rift S uses a single wire to connect to your PC and handle its processing needs.

In terms of comfort, the Rift S also has a more ergonomic head strap named Halo that was designed alongside Lenovo.

In specs, the Oculus Rift S upgrades to 256 x 1440 per eye resolution, with a pixel density of 600 ppi and a field of view of 115 degrees. The Pentile AMOLED screen found in the original Oculus Rift was replaced by a LCD, just like Oculus Go.

The biggest improvement is definitely on the tracking front, as the Oculus Rift S has five onboard cameras for inside-out camera tracking.

Not everything is better though. Two downgrades that jump out are the frame rate that went from 90hz to 80hz and the near-ear speakers that replace the on-ear headphones.

Fortunately, the PC requirements are still mostly the same, so those who owned the Oculus Rift and want to buy the Oculus Rift S won’t have to upgrade their battlestation as well.

Also read:✍HTC’s Viveport Store Is Now Open For Oculus Rift Owners✍