I think it's a smart play. Standalone VR makes it incredibly more accessible. Everyone with a Quest does the same thing, they cart it around to parties and gatherings to let people experience VR and it's a blast. Even if this wasn't intentional marketing it's the best strategy for getting the word out. I'm hoping the Del Mar is a big upgrade, if it can bring better processing and better resolution to the table hopefully with a killer feature like adaptive focus and gaze tracking then I think it'll just knock it out of the park. Regardless though it's only a matter of time until all our screens are virtual.

I just hope that publisher lock-in isn't the price we have to pay fo r all our screens to be virtual.

I mean, going forward, given the existence of Link (and that Link surprisingly actually works), there is very little reason for the Rift S to exist at all; it sucks that they sold it to people and then so quickly obsoleted it by another product that came out at the same time and cost the same amount, but other than the feeling of responsibility for those customers I can't imagine any reason for them to spend any time at all on that device line: that use case is now Quest Link; if they built and sold more of them they would just be digging themselves a deeper liability hole of more limited devices they don't want to support.

Linus Tech Tips did a pretty damn good review of the Quest + Link solution. At the time he did the review, it looked like it had some very strange black bar artifacts when turning your head quickly, which the Rift-S did not. He also described it having a slight lag in the controls.

These kinds of things are likely non-issues for your average gamer who isn't moving really fast, and isn't requiring ultra precise controls. For some people though, it's a huge deal breaker.

I'm personally very grateful for both Valve and Oculus. Oculus is serving the mass market, and doing a great job of it. I just hope in the process, we don't lose the high end consumer gear like Valve Index.

How long ago was that? The Quest link cable stuff is still in flux. Not only did they just announce a few days ago that any USB 2.0 cable should now work[1], but they note in that article that Carmack is hoping to add a new mode to take advantage of the higher bandwidth of USB 3.1.

It's entirely possible if that Linux Tech Tips review was more than a month or two ago, things might look considerably different now.

1: https://uploadvr.com/oculus-link-usb-2-update/

It was about 3 months ago:

https://youtu.be/AGScX_8plYw

He talks about "lag with lag compensation" when referring to some of the controls on the quest v.s. the rift-s

Hopefully that has improved, as I bought a quest and it arrives tomorrow! CV1 owner.

Also... Is Carmack still working on Oculus stuff? That's awesome. I got really sad when I heard he was leaving Oculus to work on general AI.

I know, it sure seems like he has a lot of skill and institutional knowledge to contribute. That said, I'm not sure what his current involvement is, I just know they referenced him in that article.

Almost feels like they were doing an A/B test