ce magazine September 2020 issue

can do things that are twice as complex, but it can also do things that are just as
complex as its predecessor while using roughly half of the power. I would imagine
Facebook will push developers to focus on the latter rather than the former,
especially considering that the XR2 is now powering a higher resolution display.
Part of that is the result of launching a full successor 18 months after its predecessor
and trying not to piss off early adopters who will also want to play the latest
releases, but it‟s also a result of Oculus choosing to optimize for form factor over
software complexity. Oculus has shaved several ounces off of the device‟s weight
and part of this has actually come from reducing the size of the device‟s battery.
Oculus tells me the engineering team redesigned the battery for the Quest 2 and that
it‟s now 18% smaller and 29% lighter.
The new display moves from OLED to the Fast-switch LCD type that the company
used on the Rift S. It still operates at 72hz, but Oculus says that it will be pushing
90hz refresh rates to the device “soon.” The most noticeable difference to users will
be the enhanced clarity of the screen which boasts a different pixel layout as well as
a lot more pixels than the previous generation, over 50% more in fact. In practical
use, the new display is noticeably clearer and makes painful VR experiences like
reading small paragraphs of text a lot less painful.
Another interesting change with the display is how IPD (inter-pupillary distance) is
shifted. A big concern with early leaks of the Quest 2 was that users wouldn‟t be
able to adjust the distance between the lenses to account for different face shapes.
42