Oculus has been toying with ways that its standalone, 6DOF Oculus Quest VR headset can emulate apps built for its previous, lower-powered standalone headset the Oculus Go.
Oculus plans to bring Go emulation to the Quest later this year, essentially allowing apps built for the lower-powered Oculus Go headset to be played on the more powerful and six degrees of freedom-enabled Oculus Quest.
Oculus CTO John Carmack tweeted about the project’s progress, saying that the feature also seeks to inspire developers to update their Oculus Go applications as “proper ‘hybrid’ Go/Quest apps with explicit support.”
Both the Go and the Quest are standalone VR headsets, but the features offered by each are quite different. The Go released in May 2018 as a standalone headset meant to be a middle ground between smartphone and PC powered VR in terms of both power and price.
While the Go offers limited head and controller tracking, the standalone Quest headset aims to offer an experience closer to its PC-tethered counterpart, but without requiring any external device to run along with inside-out, 6DOF capable tracking.
Carmack explains that, in some cases, emulated Go apps “do magically get 6DOF headset and controller tracking, as well as higher resolution and frame rate,” but that the team will also be working with developers to test how games function when emulated on the Oculus Quest.
1/3: Go emulation is coming to Quest later this year, by way of a compatibility layer that makes Quest report as a Go and emulate the Go controller for old apps.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) July 23, 2019
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