Oculus Quest review: 2019’s best new gaming system is wireless, affordable VR

Enlarge / The Oculus Quest, as enjoyed by an invisible model. (credit: Oculus)

I can take the Oculus Quest with me practically anywhere, pull it over my eyes, map out a VR space with my hands, and quickly start playing some of the best VR games currently on the market. That “anywhere” includes, for instance, the bathroom in the food court beneath Valve Software’s headquarters.

Today is a big news day for Oculus, the Facebook-owned virtual reality headset manufacturer. The company’s two recently announced VR headsets, the $400 Oculus Quest and the $400 Oculus Rift S, now have release dates (May 21), pre-order announcements (right meow, right here), and a review embargo lifted after nearly two weeks of hands-on time.

But as you may have seen, there’s other VR news today: preview embargoes for the Valve Index, which you can also read about on Ars today, have been lifted, too. Thanks to those neighboring testing periods, I did, in fact, get an opportunity to test one of Oculus Quest’s use cases in the heart of one of its main competitors. It ended up being a pointed comparison. While the Index builds upon the home VR ecosystem as we know it—the cables, the connected “gaming” PC, the exterior sensors—the Oculus Quest throws all those requirements in the trash.