Photos leaked online today depict a new Oculus Quest and new Touch controllers.
Reliable sources refer to the new device as “Oculus Quest 2”, though it is unclear if that’s an informal moniker or the final name of the device, and tell us it should enter full scale mass production next week.
This Week’s Leaks
The most recent leaks started on Wednesday, when prolific tech leaker WalkingCat tweeted what seems to be a render of a new Oculus headset.
As well as revealing the new design, the image also showed what looks like a new position for the top cameras. This could result in a wider tracking range for these new Touch controllers. The new photos now show a clearer look at the positioning of the top cameras.
Of course, the image also showed a blank space where the Quest’s lens separation adjustment slider is. This slider on the original Quest lets people adjust the position of the lens such that they match the center of their eyes, which can provide a clearer visual image for some folks with eye distances that are outside the average. Some speculated the slider could be present on the other side, or inside the headset, but the leaked photos show no such control.
Earlier today, WalkingCat tweeted yet another image, showing the headset from the rear. The lenses look like they could be new but that still remains speculation on our part without more information. If they are new it’s a possibility they could fit a wider range of interpupillary distances (IPDs) compared with previous designs like Oculus Go and Rift S but, unfortunately, the leaked photo of the rear is too blurry to make out anything useful at this time.
New ‘Jedi’ Oculus Touch
Also pictured is a Oculus Touch controller, with a lightly-colored main body and matte black face.
This would be the third revision of Oculus Touch. The first shipped in late 2016 as an accessory for the original Oculus Rift. The current revision ships with Oculus Quest and Rift S.
Not everyone was happy with the changes from the Oculus Touch v1 to v2. As we noted in our review, the handle doesn’t feel as ergonomic and the battery case slides off too easily.
The new Oculus Touch seems to return to the face design of the original, with a handle that seems to be a middle ground between the two.
What other changes are in store for this new Touch under the hood? Back in March, a reference to ‘Oculus Jedi Controller For Oculus Del Mar’ was discovered in the Oculus Mobile SDK documentation.
In April, Gerald McAlister of RGB Schemes found a driver for the ‘Jedi’ controller within the latest firmware for the consumer Quest. We analyzed the driver file and compared it to the current Touch driver file.
This week we found the code referencing “Jedi” is present as of this writing in the latest public testing release of the Oculus PC software code.
The code suggested a controller with the same buttons and triggers (as we see in the leaked images). However, the code also suggested some under the hood improvements: a higher rate infrared LED pulsing mode that could relate to better tracking, a new accelerator & gyroscope, some form of analog finger sensing, and a haptics thread not present on Touch v2.
It’s unclear which, if any, of these potential improvements may appear in the final product.
