Facebook’s next-generation Oculus Quest 2 standalone VR headset ships in October starting at $299 with Qualcomm’s latest XR2 chipset driving major upgrades including a 90 hz mode and much higher resolution.
The new Oculus Quest 2 “all-in-one” arrives to buyers starting October 13. Pre-orders start today for the 64 GB headset and Touch controllers priced as a package starting $100 less than its 2019 predecessor. The original baseline Quest price of $399 is now the price for the upgraded version of Quest 2 with 256 GB of storage.
Quest 2 specs and images have circulated widely in the past few months, and today’s announcement confirms most of the leaked details. Primarily, the Quest 2 is a slimmer and lighter version of the Quest. The headset weighs in at 503 grams instead of 571 grams and is slightly shallower than its predecessor. It features a soft cloth head strap instead of a stiff rubber one, and it’s primarily white instead of black, but it’s still a self-contained inside-out headset with four tracking cameras mounted on the front, plus two black-and-white Oculus Touch motion controllers.
The new headset uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chipset instead of a Snapdragon 835, and it’s got 6GB of RAM instead of 4GB. The base model still has 64GB of storage, but the expanded $399 model has 256GB, twice the original Quest’s equivalent. The screen’s resolution is much higher: 1832 x 1920 pixels per eye instead of the Quest’s 1440 x 1600 pixels. The current refresh rate is still a suboptimal 72Hz, but a 90Hz upgrade is coming after launch.
The Quest 2 comes with a series of optional accessories. Some are comfort- and convenience-oriented, including custom Logitech earbuds and a plastic “Elite Strap” that provides more head support, sold with or without an additional battery pack.
The $79 Link USB-C cable, however, enables a major extra feature: it lets you plug the Quest 2 into a PC and play desktop VR games. This feature was added to the Quest last year, but Oculus will be bringing it out of beta and discontinuing the Rift S in the coming months, making the Quest its only PC VR headset option.
Quest 2, of course, does require your Facebook account. And while we’re on that subject, Oculus Quest 2 effectively marks the end for all other VR headsets from Facebook that didn’t have that requirement. Oculus Go is already gone, Oculus Quest 2 immediately replaces the original and the Rift PC-only VR headset product line is soon done.
