Modding my Oculus Go; what an adventure.

MAJOR UPDATE - November 1st, 2020: The Oculus Go was just released, and for a starting price of $299 for 128GB of storage, its a slam dunk of a deal! Please opt to get that if you’d like one, otherwise you can find an original Quest for $150-$200. The Oculus Go was recently discontinued with the new shake-up of a lineup. The original blogpost is below however, just for archival and legacy purposes.

ORIGINAL POST - March 2020:

I’ve had my Oculus Go for 3 months now (almost approaching 4), and I have been blown away by the features it brought. VR to the masses, huh? Who woulda thought? However, there are a few limitations that have been brought to my attention after I used my Rift side by side. In this post, i will take a deep dive and have a little fun explaining the gripes I have with this, how I modded this thing, and if it can be compared to the Oculus Quest.

Oculus Go: why would people choose this?

The Oculus Go is best described as a standing point between the Gear VR, which requires a phone, and the Oculus Quest, a stand-alone VR headset that is more than double the price of the Oculus Go, due to absurd pricing nowadays. The Oculus Go is a sleek looking headset, mostly designed for media consumption (More about that later). It has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 chip paired with an Adreno 530 GPU, 3GB of memory, and 32GB of eMMC storage. That is at least what I got for an amazing $149.

Now, for being a media consumption device, it’s amazing. Battery life is expected, with about 3 hours of max battery life. The screen has a better resolution, with 2560x1440 fast switch LCD and a 60hz refresh rate (developers can up that to 72hz). Netflix worked plug and play, the web browser allows for YouTube full-fledged, and for those kinds of people, it just works. But, there is one huge limitation for gamers and power users.

The Oculus Go’s limits

Like any tech, the Go has a limit, and it’s a pretty big one. It only allows for 3DOF (3 degrees of freedom) instead of normal 6DOF on the Oculus Rift and Quest. This is eh for people who use this for Netflix, but a big ugh for gamers and power users. Get a quest if you want full fledged gaming on VR with no wires, but it has an absurd price of $500 or more.

But, I like modding. I’ve modded so many things, from my Kindle Fire all the way back in 2013, to the Nexus line of phones, to recently gaming consoles, cars, and iPhones. I will tell you about all mods I have completed on this lowly $150 VR headset.

My mods

I had one goal; Oculus Rift/Quest at less than $250, including the headset. I had only $100 to spend on mods. Good enough.

My first mod; a better battery. I replaced the measly battery here with a laptop battery that is the same and manufactured by the same company, but with a 3500mah battery. Battery life: increased to 3hr gaming, 4.5hrs media consumption. Amazing.

Second and most important mod; 6DOF tracking. This was fun. First, I needed a 6DOF tracking system. The Nolo VR came to mind, but that is $200, and you can just get a rift for $200+$150. It didn’t make sense. I wanted the bottom of the barrel cheap. 

So I went to GameStop and bought an Xbox 360 Kinect sensor for $25 and PSMove controllers for $70. 

I am blown away. Completely blown away.

Setup with ALVR was easy, but I did need an adapter to convert the proprietary Kinect wire to USB ($5 on Amazon). Once I connected that, I was able to stream my SteamVR library to my Go and play Beat saber (if you’re wondering bout the songs, Starboy, $100 Bills, Catch me Outside by Ski Mask, and many more), BoxVR, and HoloBall. I had little latency with the controllers and the headset over 5ghz WiFi with a 100 down/10 up connection.

Final thoughts

I’ve had a lot of time extensively testing this. It is safe to say that if you are on a really tight budget, for about $249 you can have a full tracked 6DOF VR experience, with the portability of the Oculus Go. This does not really compare with the Oculus Quest (I am playing around with the go as a quest; stay tuned), but it’s a nice sweet spot. 6DOF at home, portability elsewhere, and an amazing price. The Oculus Go is a really great headset, and at more than half the price of the Rift, and a fourth of the price of the Quest, I highly recommend this to someone who does more media consumption, and less gaming. 

Links and Credits

This was fun. If you do want to do this, feel free to click on the links below to get your stuff. 

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If you’d like to send feedback, or if you’re smarter than me and noticed I missed something, feel free to tweet me @ twitter or message me on discord; TotallyNotNero#0420. 

                                                                                           Thanks for reading! 

LINKS: 

Oculus Go

ALVR

Xbox 360 Kinect: any game retailer ever