Oculus go review in Spanish (full analysis)

If two big manufacturers like Oculus and Xiaom i are added, only quality virtual reality glasses can come out and at a low price such as the Oculus Go. One of the first truly Standalone virtual reality glasses. In virtuous jargon, this means that they do not depend on a PC or a mobile phone (almost) for their operation.

The Oculus Go incorporate everything necessary to function on its own, it can be compared to the Gear VR, for which Oculus also collaborated with Samsung, but this time without the hassle of having to introduce a smartphone inside. With this solution, you take full advantage and control of both the performance and the autonomy of the battery, to enjoy as much as possible and anywhere imaginable, of our virtual worlds.

Oculus Go technical features

Unboxing

The box draws attention by showing both a part of the beautiful design of the viewer and a short gallery of images of the apps compatible with it, very similar to what Sony already did with its boxes on Playstation 1 and 2. This box opens sliding its upper part and allowing the lower part to rest on the table when opening it. It is a great idea to open it easily, but dangerous for the clueless who do not put their fingers under it when transporting the box.

Once the box is opened, it is revealed how well organized the different components are:

• Oculus Go viewfinder.Controller.AA battery.MicroUSB cable type B.Strap.Glasses separator.Glass cloth.Safety and warranty manual.

A design with true Deja vu

The first thing that comes to mind the first time you look at the Oculus Go, is its great external resemblance to the Oculus Rift with the difference in the grayish color of these new ones. Truly, in addition to having a robust yet sophisticated design, you can appreciate the quality of the materials and components, something that Oculus and Xiaomi have always been able to boast about in previous products.

Among the strengths of this viewfinder, its compact size of only 190 x 105 x 115 mm, and its "light" weight of 469 grams, lower than most viewfinders on the market, can be praised. Both are very important characteristics in a standalone designed to take anywhere.

The Oculus Go have other very well resolved characteristics such as: spatial sound, thanks to the incorporation of a speaker in each of the rigid tapes that are attached laterally to each side of the viewfinder, and the pad on which to support the face, the which has a quite thick and spongy padding that allows us to get close enough to the lenses without suffering any discomfort and without letting light trail, at least as far as the upper part is concerned, through the hollow of the nose if that Enter some clarity since the Oculus Go do not have any accessories in this area. At least, we will always have the possibility of looking sideways through this opening to locate ourselves.

In case of using glasses, we will have the possibility of introducing a rubber accessory between the hardware of the lenses and the face pad, which will add a few millimeters of amplitude.

The elastic strap style fastening, similar to that worn by many viewfinders such as HTC Vive, seemed at first glance that it would not be the most recommended option, but after testing the viewfinder for a while, I can say without fear of being wrong, that it is a system that works quite well with Oculus Go. The glasses do not move much from their place and the tapes distribute the weight more or less well on the house. On the other hand, the use of tapes instead of a rigid system, allows greater space savings when transporting.

Finally, it is worth mentioning the buttons located on the upper edge of the case, a small one to turn the device on and off, and another larger button that is divided into two parts, to increase and decrease the volume. Between both buttons, we have a led to keep us updated on the status of the viewfinder. At the bottom, near the nose bridge, a small microphone is also incorporated.

On the left side, next to the edge furthest from the face, in its place we find two ports, a microUSB type B port to charge or connect the viewfinder to the PC; and a 3.5mm jack audio port.

Finally, the Oculus logo is highly visible on the front while the Xiaomi logo is hidden under the rigid tape on the left side.

Compact but with good resolution

The Oculus Go mounts a single 5.5-inch LCD screen with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 pixels (1280 x 1440 per eye) and a density of 538 pixels per inch. This gives us a sharper image quality than that offered by first-generation PC viewers such as the HTC Vive, but less than that provided by the latest viewers such as HTC Vive Pro or Samsung Odyssey.

However, one aspect in which the Oculus Go are unfavorable with respect to other viewers already on the market is the screen refresh, which is maintained between 60 and 72 Hz according to the requirement of each application, somewhat far from the 90 Standard Hz on PC. Obviously, this decrease in screen refreshment is justified in that it is preferable, on a portable device, to maintain a minimum quality of display, than to pretend to want to cover a lot and the final quality suffers. Therefore, it was decided to maintain an intermediate but stable refreshment. In the end, after our time testing the viewer, we can say that we have not noticed any flickering or stuttering in the image, either playing or playing videos.

Beyond the screen refresh, LCD technology has always had some drawbacks compared to other panels, such as the level of its blacks or the switching speed of its pixels, which is why Oculus presented the Fast-switch LCD panel at its conference. to replace this last defect and gain response time on your screen.

Although Oculus did not comment on this, it is possible to assume that they also use a TN type LCD panel, which in addition to having a low cost, has a low response time that avoids the suffered Ghosthing (phantom image). One of its biggest drawbacks is the poor quality of its angles, fortunately it is not something that greatly affects these types of viewers.

Removing the representation of the black color, both the contrast and the other colors and brightness are quite good, although without reaching the level of the OLED panels. It is curious that Oculus Go is one of the few viewers in which it is possible to modify the brightness from its settings panel. Most of the image problems, as we will see below, are caused by the lenses.

Last but not least, it is necessary to talk about the Screen Door Effect or Grid Effect. Seeing the grid between pixels has always been a defect of most screens, but it was especially noticeable in the first desktop viewers and even continues to make an appearance in newer models, the Oculus Go has done a great job and sometimes we really have to get psyched looking for that grid between pixels to see it slightly. It is a good step on the way forward, especially considering that we are talking about a low-cost standalone viewer.

The Fresnel return with their pros and cons

By inspecting the lenses closely and seeing the rings that compose it, we quickly conclude that we are dealing with Fresnel-type lenses, and if we look at the specifications, we conclude that they are normal fresnel like those of HTC Vive and not hybrids like the Oculus Rift ones.

These lenses, in addition to better concentrating the light at one point, are lighter and cheaper to manufacture but they carry some defects already known as the unwanted Glare or glare, which, as its name indicates, are beams of light that appear in very scenes contrasted as a consequence of light scattering. It should be noted that this effect appears less pronounced than in other viewers, either thanks to an improvement in hardware or software.

Another visible defect is chromatic aberration, caused by the inability of the lenses to focus different colors at the same distance, and therefore colored halos appear on the contour of some objects in the image. In this particular case, the chromatic aberration luckily is only seen in the outer area of ​​the image. There are ways to try to correct this defect using software, but on a device like this, this would entail a higher workload for the processor, and like hertz, a moderately good and stable image is preferred in exchange for sacrificing something. visual quality.

If the field of view or FOV of the Oculus Rift was somewhat less than the 110º that it promised and stayed around 90º or 100º, in these Oculus Go something similar happens, instead of 90º, the final field of vision is around the 85th, an amount that despite being scarce today, at least stays close to that of his older brother.

Another important section that involves the lenses is the surface of the lenses that offer a really sharp vision with respect to their total surface. This crisp surface, also called the sweet spot, extends across the center of the lens and takes up around 80% of the lens. A really large surface if we compare it again with previous viewers.

In conjunction with the screens and despite the aforementioned defects, we find a formula that works quite cohesively.

Now with spatial sound

The spatial sound that can be heard from the speakers embedded in the side tapes offers sufficient quality and power for almost all situations where ambient noise is not very high. It is true that, although the sound is good, when they are open part of the immersion of the closed headphones is lost, luckily, we will always have the opportunity to connect headphones through the 3.5 mm Jack connector or via bluetooth. Fixed headphones as standard as those of the Rift would have triggered a greater display, which would have subtracted points when transporting.

Android plus Oculus Home

The operating system that runs on the Oculus Go starts from a version of Android modified to specifically integrate with both the hardware and the Oculus environment. The Home or main menu that receives us after configuring and putting on the viewfinder, is an evolution of what can be found in the Gear VR. At the top we will have some boxes through which we will navigate depending on the tab that we are, and that will sometimes offer us suggestions based on our tastes.

At the bottom is where we find the different main tabs of the system: Navigation, People, Sharing, Notifications and Settings. Within them we will find other subtabs.

Navigation through the system is really simple and intuitive, and most importantly, it responds properly and smoothly. During our tests we have not seen any slowdown or hang of the system, this demonstrates the good optimization and stability that the company has achieved prior to its launch.

What is certain is that the software has some peculiarities, the main one is that it must be taken into account that the first time the viewer is configured, it will be necessary to have an Oculus account and a smartphone to link it via Bluetooth with the Oculus Go. Once linked, we will configure some aspects such as Wi-Fi, the hand we usually use, etc. and we will enter the main menu.

From that moment, in addition to starting to use the Oculus Go, we will continue to have the possibility from the smartphone to see the status of our viewer, buy in the Oculus store from it and even make some extra adjustments such as connecting some additional Bluetooth peripherals or activating developer mode. This leads us to the conclusion that the need to have a smartphone to configure the glasses is mandatory, but only at certain times, not always.

Despite having the Oculus store by default in the viewer and being able to download a multitude of apps, one aspect to consider is the possibility of streaming from other devices. We will be able to watch videos from our PC in the Oculus Go with applications such as Bigscreen or Skybox VR, available in the Oculus Store. We will also have the possibility to see our photos stored on the smartphone if we wish. Finally, we always have the classic option of connecting the viewer to the PC using a microUSB cable and copying the images or videos to the internal memory, however in that case it must be borne in mind that the available internal memory is not very large, There is only one 32GB and one 64GB model.

Taking advantage of performance

Oculus Go mounts the Snapdragon 821 SoC with 4 Kryo cores, two of them at 2.3 GHz and another two at 2.15 GHz along with the Adreno 530 GPU and 3GB of LPDDR4 RAM.

As we see, it is an option far from the recent Snapdragon 845, but it is obviously given by lowering costs in the face of the final price. However, to alleviate that, the Oculus engineers opted for various techniques to get the most out of this SoC without penalizing the battery too much.

One of those techniques, as the company already announced is static / fixed screen rendering, which basically renders different parts of the screen with different resolutions, so the center part is rendered at full resolution while the outer edges are rendered at half or a quarter of the original resolution. The eye does not notice it as much and it is gained in final performance.

Another resource used by Oculus engineers is to dynamically overclock the SoC to achieve greater power at specific times when processing performance needs it. With this, the autonomy of the Oculus Go is optimized and extended.

During our tests with different games such as Dead and Buried, Tomb Raider, Epic Roller coasters and One-Man Vurguer we have not noticed any jerk and only at a small moment we have been able to notice a slight drop in frames.

3DOF Controller

The Oculus Go, like the Gear VR, has a 3DOF type controller that works by measuring inertia and collects the movements made in the X and Y axis, or what is the same: sideways, up and down. We will not be able to make any kind of forward or backward movement to catch things like in the desktop viewfinders.

The controller has a touch trackpad that works quite correctly to scroll through lists, this trackpad also has the function of being able to click on it as if it were a PC mouse. The front part also has two buttons: one to go back, and another to go to the main menu or readjust the position of the controller if pressed for a few seconds. This last option will come in handy on some occasions when we see that the controller begins to move away from our body or does not point so accurately. Finally, in the back we find the typical trigger, very necessary both for games where you shoot or grab something and to move through the main menu and select options.

For the use that is given to the Oculus Go, and the price it has, this controller meets perfectly. Greater precision would have led to an increase in the final price.

A rather fair battery

Although Oculus did not give details on the battery's capacity, it was later discovered that it houses 2, 600 mAh. A priori, in a novel device of this type, it is difficult to estimate the time of use that it will give us. The company in its conference estimated that between 2 hours and 2 and a half hours, and they were not lying. During our test time with different games and multimedia content, the autonomy has been between those 2 hours and 2 and a half hours at most. The longest battery life occurs when only multimedia content such as videos or movies is viewed. True, more capacity could have been included, but it would have had an impact on the final weight of the Oculus Go.

There is always the possibility of connecting a powerbank to it, although the instructions advise against using the viewfinder while charging, that is up to each consumer. And do not forget the brightness selector, another aspect of personal configuration but that can earn us a few extra minutes of use.

The Oculus Go charge, unfortunately, does not have a fast charge or similar, so it is necessary to wait a little more than 2 hours to reach 100%.

Conclusion and final words on the Oculus Go

As I commented at the beginning of the analysis, the union between Oculus and Xiaomi could not have had a better outcome. Each of the companies has done their best to bring us a viewer that combines many advantages.

It can be seen as the union of many small well-chosen parts such as the resolution of the screen, the lenses, the speakers and the robust but lightweight design offer a product that leaves a good final feeling. Beyond the hardware part, thanks largely to Xiaomi, we see the good work of Oculus that thanks to all their experience and previous baggage they know how to take advantage of both hardware and software for the user. In an experience that provides added value, and that not any company is capable of achieving without having previously had a journey.

We recommend reading the best virtual reality PC configuration

When creating a device for the masses and with a competitive price, there are sections in which it is necessary to sacrifice a part, in addition to the current limits of technology in some technical aspects, so the battery is not the strong point of the Oculus Go. Its autonomy seems scarce for those who devote a large number of hours in virtual reality. For those who are just looking for a multimedia device for a couple of hours or entertaining themselves with some of their games, they will see the Oculus Go as the almost perfect viewer for these days.

The greatest virtue of the Oculus Go, ask whoever you ask, and we have asked many people, is its competitive price, especially based on what it offers and its good technical invoice. Both in the official Oculus store and on Amazon.es it is possible to find the 32GB model of internal memory for only € 219, and the 64GB model for € 269.

Oculus Go, Glasses and Independent Virtual Reality Headphones, 32 Gb Wide Quad, Quick-Change LCD - Improves visual clarity and reduces screen effect 141, 60 EUR

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ Compact and lightweight design.	- Little autonomy.
+ Good screen quality.	- Little internal memory.
+ Very competitive price.	- Control with only 3 degrees of freedom.
+ Good spatial sound.
+ Well-optimized system.

The Professional Review team awards you the gold medal and recommended product:

Oculus Go

DESIGN - 90%

SCREEN AND LENSES - 86%

PERFORMANCE - 81%

AUTONOMY - 72%

PRICE - 95%

85%