 There are two ways to join the 1%. You can get a job that earns you over $200,000 US a year, or you can buy a VR PC gaming headset. And until recently, those things probably went pretty well near hand-in-hand, given the high cost of entry for enthusiast-grade VR. But not so anymore. While at $400, the Oculus Rift S is hardly an impulse purchase, it improves upon its predecessor in a number of key ways, while costing less than any other flagship VR headset did at its launch. I mean, to put it in perspective, $400, while still expensive, is actually cheaper than what HTC is still asking for the original Vive. So, the entire founding Oculus team may be gone now, but Facebook is far from giving up on its vision for VR. So, why don't we take it for a test drive? Whoa, someone tightened this like crazy. This video is brought to you by Corsair. Corsair's new Hydro-X series of custom water cooling components includes blocks, reservoirs, fittings, adapters, and more. Check them out at the link in the video description. You know, it's a funny thing, but I feel like the box is a big part of the sales pitch for the Rift S. The packaging for this thing is quite literally half the size of the package for the Valve Index, which is full of lighthouse sensors, wires, power adapters, and even a feline companion to walk you through the complicated setup process. Rift S, on the other hand, I am wearing or holding everything that was in there. There's a VR headset with the requisite tether cable and two controllers that go on your hands, and that's it. You're off to the virtual world. Have a beautiful time. Now, the thing is, I was initially dismissive of the Rift S because it was my belief that inside-out tracking was a dead end for room-scale experiences compared to the more traditional approach where the headset uses fixed-location external sensors or emitters to orient itself in 3D space. And in fairness to me, that wasn't a totally radical assumption. I mean, for one thing, there's the obviously enormous technical hurdle of trying to have one moving object orient itself within a space while simultaneously tracking both the position and orientation of not one but two additional moving objects. I mean, holy cat balls, right? And then for another, there was the awful experience that I had with first-generation attempts at this technology from the couple of Windows Mixed Reality headsets that I got hands-on time with. But here we are, and I am damn impressed. Now, it does seem to take a second or two to lock in the first time that I put it on, but once it does, it is far, far better than I expected. So Oculus built a system that they call Oculus Insight that uses three simultaneous tracking methods. First is the accelerometer and gyroscope data from both the headset and the controller. Wait, why am I illustrating this? Facebook made their own video. Ah, there we go. That's better. So this is great for quickly detecting changes in both position and orientation. But the thing is, these types of sensors have a tendency to drift over time, so they need to be anchored in some way. The second means of tracking comes from the five cameras built into the Rift S here, here, here, here, and here. These scan the room, creating a 3D map based on easily identifiable landmarks like the corner of a piece of furniture or a high contrast pattern on a rug. That is what keeps the other sensors from drifting. But then, we also need to take care of the controllers. Well, that's where the IR emitters on the rings come in. The same cameras that scan the room track these up to 30 times per second, ensuring that any weirdness from the onboard sensors can be quickly corrected. Finally then, there's an AI software component that will make its best guess any time the data looks suspect, like for example, if a controller is momentarily occluded by like, say for example, a piece of clothing. Like this one that you can get on lttstore.com. YKK zipper. Of course, none of that would matter if the headset wasn't any good. So... is it? That's a bit complicated. The specs are about as mixed of a bag as I could possibly imagine. The new generation touch controllers are light and comfortable with AA batteries for quick swapping. The speakers are built in actually to the headset right here and here, and kind of suck. So I guess it's a good thing there's a 3.5mm jack right here. The halo style headband seems to have been pulled straight out of the PSVR designer sketchbook and it's got really nice cushions on it, but one thing that I found is that it's kind of uncomfortable to pull on unless you adjust it big, put it on, and then adjust it back small. Like I like to leave mine pre-adjusted, but I can't really do that. And because there's no angle adjustment here, there's no way to just flip up the headset and go back to the real world for a little bit other than just using the integrated cameras to look around. Though in Oculus's defense, that is a much better experience than I've had on the HTC Vive, as well as the Valve Index. Now, a big contributor to the improvement in visual quality is the lenses. They are just plain better than last generation, except for one small problem. There's no slider down here to adjust the interpupillary distance through hardware, and Oculus instead relies on a software adjustment. Now, it wasn't a problem for me, and I actually got excellent clarity out of this headset, but given how much grousing that I've seen about it online, it definitely merits mentioning. Finally, there's the screen. At 2560 by 1440, and using an LCD rather than an OLED, this thing not only lacks perfect blacks in a way that was immediately noticeable, it is much lower res than even the Vive Pro, which launched over two years ago. Now, the good news here is that even going back to the original Rift, I always found that thanks to Oculus's careful attention to optics and anti-aliasing, the screen door effect is mitigated more on their headsets than necessarily on their competitors. So I found that they've been able to punch above the weight that their displays' pure pixel count would suggest. So the image actually looks really sharp, and it comes with the added benefit of being easier for your PC to drive. But... perhaps too easy. Let's, uh... Let's, uh, jump in here, and I'll talk about my biggest complaint about the Rift S. First, some good stuff. SteamVR picked up my Rift S without much hassle, so I didn't have to rebuy any games. The controllers are super light, which allowed me to hit my all-time best in KDA Popstars on my very first run-through, which I thought was pretty sick. And thanks to Oculus's excellent tracking tech, I also had more luck with my wrist flicks in HoloBall. But the entire experience was marred by one big flaw. I think I'm looking into the camera. Am I? Yes, I am. Cool, that's awesome. I had hoped that Facebook would be able to work some kind of magic to make an 80Hz display seem better than it is. But... it's just obviously a step in the wrong direction. One of my biggest criticisms of the Vive Pro was that it sold itself as an upgrade to the original Vive while leaving the refresh rate at a mere 90Hz. So... clearly, reducing it is gonna piss me off. Now, like any performance deficiency, it's no big deal if you're just hanging out in the menu system or enjoying your 120-inch computer monitor or playing Trover Saves the Universe, like a more sightseeing type game. But it's really noticeable during fast-paced and intense gaming moments. For a while, I actually thought that there was something wrong with my dual 2080 Ti gaming PC over there, because I noticed these choppy animations when there were lots of particle effects going on in Beat Saber, and it turns out that it was nothing to do with my graphics card performance and just everything to do with the 80Hz refresh rate of my display when I'm used to playing at 120Hz on the Valve Index. And there were a handful of other things that annoyed me. Like the fact that you're watching this video right now, and you still haven't hit the subscribe button. Okay, so the tether being off to the side, rather than right down the middle of my head. It's not like it pulls me to one side of the room or anything like that, but it was something that I was constantly aware of, which I did find reduced immersion. And I found that during very vigorous movements, like on the Quest, the battery covers on the remotes would sometimes slip off while I was playing, though not fall off entirely, so it's more of a distraction and less of a game-breaking problem. And I don't want these criticisms to take away from my overall positive feelings about the Rift S, because here's the thing. As much as my living room does finally look decent, thanks to some cable management that I did, no amount of adhesive wire channels is going to make it simple to fire up a Vive or an Index upstairs in the study, or pack it up and take it to a friend's house. The portability and simplicity here is a big advantage for the Rift S over any of its competitors, and its own predecessor, and the reliability of its inside-out tracking has given me a new hope for this technology for the future. All I can hope for now is that Facebook is working on a true second-gen Rift with the same tech that they're not going to farm out to Lenovo for the design because they're too busy working on the Quest, which, by the way, I also recently reviewed, and you should go check that out. After this message from our sponsor. We use Squarespace here at Linus Media Group for both our linusmediagroup.com and ltxexpo.com websites, and we were able to build them spectacularly quickly. If you haven't heard already, Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to get your website up and running. You can choose from a ton of different templates and find the one that makes the most sense for your needs, and if you need help, Squarespace offers webinars, a full series of help guides, or you can even contact their 24-7 support team to help you build your site. So go to squarespace.com forward slash ltt and get 10% off today. So I'm back. Now, normally I don't put content after the sponsor spot, but I figured most people wouldn't care about this because I'm kind of nitpicking and I, but I really wanted to talk about it. I think choosing DisplayPort for the Rift S rather than HDMI was sort of a rookie error. Don't worry, David, I'll come back over there. And I will explain why. Now, DisplayPort is certainly a modern high-performance and PC-centric connector, so it kind of makes sense on paper to switch over to it, but there's a small problem. The first generation of VR headsets from both competitors like HTC and Oculus themselves used HDMI. So this entire VR-ready ecosystem was actually built up around hardware-like graphics cards that had extra HDMI ports on them specifically for that secondary VR headset or even PCs that had front-mounted HDMI plugs on them. Making matters worse, many perfectly VR-capable machines like the ASUS ZenBook Pro Duo that I had actually intended to put through its gaming paces with the Rift S have no way of plugging into this thing because they don't have a DisplayPort output. Now, theoretically, this is an easy problem to solve. Facebook has an FAQ that says, oh, well, you could just use a USB Type-C or an HDMI to DisplayPort adapter. Except for a couple small problems. So the Thunderbolt 3 hub that I tried, one that had DisplayPort, wouldn't show up as directly attached to the dedicated GPU because of a limitation in the way that Oculus's software detects what it's attached to, not that it should care, and problem number two, there is no such thing as an HDMI port to DisplayPort female adapter because that's just not how it works. Going the other way around is simple because there are standard implementations to carry everything from DVI to HDMI to freaking VGA over a DisplayPort output. But there has basically been no reason to do it the other way around until this one device now. So unless Facebook plans to engineer some kind of active adapter, there is just no way to plug it in. Now, this whole situation would have made sense if the display resolution and refresh rate had somehow justified the move to DisplayPort. But it's DP1.2, which happens to be specced for nearly the exact same maximum bandwidth as HDMI 2.0, which has been shipping in PCs for five years now. So that theory can quickly be discarded. So, yeah, I guess that's all I really have to say about that. I guess we're doing the classic Seinfeld double goodbye here. So I'll make a new conclusion. While the Rift S was largely a good experience, it's worth noting that my time spent with it made me eager to fire up my index more than it made me crave more Rift S. Though with that said, if I didn't already have an index because I had to buy it in order to review it, I know where my money, all less than half as much of it, would go. So you can take that however you will.