Rift goes wireless: Ars walks around in Oculus’ Santa Cruz VR prototype

SAN JOSE, Calif.—As great as it is enjoying untethered virtual reality on devices like Samsung's Gear VR and Google Daydream, these portable experiences are held back by their lack of full head-tracking. Without it, you're pretty much stuck sitting in one place and tilting your head on a swivel—you can't even shift side-to-side or lean down to look at a virtual object without the entire virtual world moving along with you.

As Oculus announced Thursday, the company is actively looking to fix this problem with "a completely new category" of virtual reality headset with "inside-out" tracking technology. By using cameras built in to the device itself, combined with computer vision algorithms, inside-out tracking lets a headset calculate your position and head angle as you walk freely about a room, with no external cameras or PC/console tether required.

I got a chance to try out an early prototype of Oculus' effort, dubbed the "Santa Cruz" prototype, at the company's Oculus Connect conference late this week. The prototype isn't perfect, but it already shows a lot of promise and a distinct vision for what portable VR will look like in the future.