"Today, we showed the next phase of Santa Cruz development, delivering hand presence with two positionally tracked controllers. This is an important, industry-first milestone that brings the magic and incredible design expertise of Touch into a completely standalone experience."
Santa Cruz is a standalone headset. The content, headset tracking, and controller tracking all run on hardware that fits inside the headset.
This stands in contrast to current PC VR hardware which requires PC, cable, and sensors (whether lighthouse beacons or rift cameras).
It does require a separate graphics card, though requiring separate PC or console.
There need to be a place to dissipate that 200W+ of power current GTX cards are using, and this is not possible to fit it in kind of binoculars.
Thats marketing gimmick Oculus is doing: it does not require phone (as daydream does) but it does require graphics powerhouse to generate all the virtual reality (unless you don't want the world to be as in current AAA games which DO REQUIRE GTX kind of power).
No it's fully standalone probably using mobile graphics hardware which as noted by the Daydream etc. is already fine. It won't have the fidelity of the tethered versions but not being attached to anything is a tremendous win in terms of making the technology usable by anyone.
Because this (not requiring PC to show VR) either means:
1) Oculus is standalone (not requiring nvidias/amd 200W+ 200USD powershouses) with comparable quality/features to what other (with PC) sets are doing currently
OR
2) it is not standalone UNLESS you have much (and here I mean much!) worse quality
ad1: this would mean that Oculus did a great breakthrough (rendering price of nvidia stock overvalued tenfold - which we don't see) while also solving heat dissipation issue (look at your typical GTX card and cooling they require and POWER they require).
ad2: currently, AAA games do require powerhouse in graphics department, and they still have a lot space to improve (from visual perspective). For VR you need 90fps lowlatency dual(sic!) rendered graphics - this brings you either subpar quality (A LOT OF SUBPAR) - hence I concluded this "no pc required) marketing gimmick of Oculus. Yep, it may work, but not at the level (not even close) to other solutions.
In my darkest days I feel like my job as a Software Engineer is to be pedantic to new ideas, because my work has trained me to be incurability micro oriented.
It's different from the vive controller due to not having external sensors, but its very similar to what Microsoft showcased with all their new touch controllers and inside out third party headset for Windows Holographic
How is this different than the vive controller?