Oculus Go Emulation Coming Later This Year for Oculus Quest
There’s been a little flurry of news regarding the Oculus Quest today. Oculus Venues has been added to the platform and the headset has seen improvements to its controllers and Guardian system. But there is more coming, with Oculus’ CTO John Carmack taking to Twitter to reveal Oculus Go emulation is on the way.
In a series of three tweets, Carmack revealed that: “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. We will be working with developers to test against the emulator, but I hope some will be inspired enough to convert older apps to proper “hybrid” Go / Quest apps with explicit support.”
“Not everything works, but many old apps do magically get 6DOF headset and controller tracking, as well as higher resolution and frame rate, so it is fun to dig through some old favourites.”
That certainly sounds promising for developers which concentrated on supporting the Oculus Go when it first arrived in 2018. Hopefully breathing new life into those old apps which could do with some 6DoF magic. Interest has seemingly wained of late as the device tends to be used for media consumption such as Netflix or Hulu. The launch of Oculus Quest likely hasn’t helped the entry-level headset even though there’s a significant price difference.
Oculus Go exclusives such as Coatsink Software’s They Suspect Nothing would have the most to gain from this sort of update to Oculus Quest, has the headset has proved to be very popular. Whether cross-buy functionality will be a thing between them, in the same way between Quest and Oculus Rift/Rift S isn’t clear at this time.
The official support would certainly help to tie-in both of Oculus’ standalone headsets, and make upgrading to Oculus Quest a far more enticing prospect for Oculus Go owners who are undecided. VRFocus will continue to follow development of this story, with more details likely to surface in September during Oculus Connect 6 (OC6), possibly as part of Carmack’s keynote presentation. If that happens, we’ll let you know.
https://www.vrfocus.com/2019/07/oculus-go-emulation-coming-later-this-year-for-oculus-quest/