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The excitement for last year’s launch of the Oculus Rift was dulled when people found out about the HTC Vive. At launch, the HTC Vive appeared to offer so much more than the Oculus Rift. People were impressed by its capacity to provide full room-scale tracking experiences that worked with its impressive touch controllers. The Oculus began to catch up around Christmas when the Oculus Touch controllers were released.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cff_JSWAtps
This helped the Oculus a bit, but most consumers still assumed that HTC offered a fuller and more complete virtual reality experience. Everything changes with Oculus’ newest 1.15 update which provides roomscale tracking to Oculus Rift owners. As the changelog below indicates, the Oculus Rift is now more or less at feature parity with the HTC Vive.
Release 1.15
- Features:
- Improved 360° tracking and roomscale support.
- We further improved sensor setup for multi-sensor configurations.
- 360° tracking with three sensors is now fully supported for sitting, standing, and roomscale play modes.
- 360° tracking with two sensors is still experimental. Learn more in our help center
- Improved 360° tracking and roomscale support.
Roomscale tracking?
For those that don’t know what roomscale tracking is, you are missing out! Roomscale tracking is not just for games. A wide variety of adult applications, technical applications, and general simulations use roomscale tracking to provide deeper and more immersive virtual reality experiences. In general, roomscale tracking works by tracking users’ movements within a small environment – hence the roomscale.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abTo0JpjNyg
The HTC Vive uses laser sensors called Lighthouse trackers. Set up requires that three of these sensors are placed around a room to track a user’s movement. The Oculus tracking system works somewhat differently. Called Constellation trackers, Oculus’ system “utilizes optical sensors that detect the IR LED markers on the tracked devices” (Xinreality). The Oculus system can track roughly the same volume size as the HTC Vive. To do this, users must buy 3 sensors which are not included with the consumer version of the Oculus Rift.
Why didn’t Oculus Include roomscale tracking for launch?
Oculus founder Lucky Palmer argued that the lack of roomscale tracking in the original Oculus release was not a technical choice but a choice made to help developers. Early on Palmer even said, “The system may match [Lighthouse] in terms of capabilities, but we’re not trying to push that as something for developers to do. Most of the developers we’ve talked to don’t want to limit their audience beyond a subset of a subset of a subset of users.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JulB0E-9SPQ
Palmer went on to say, “You have people who have PCs that are powerful enough to run VR (or willing to buy one), then of that set, people who are interested in virtual reality. [Developers] don’t want to narrow it then down to people who want to clear out large spaces in their homes.” Essentially, Palmer misestimated the market. He thought customers would not be interested because of the spatial requirements of roomscale tracking. Gamers did not seem to mind making space for VR.
The release of this patch is great news as Oculus owners will soon be able to take advantage of roomscale software first developed by HTC’s system. That said, it will take some time for developers to catch on this new software/hardware trick.
Well the experimental room scale tracking has been pretty faultless with 3 sensors for months now, so I’m not surprised they’ve nixed the ‘experimental’ moniker.
Finally we have the Oculus update with more immersive tracking to compete with the HTC Vive…. Need to try this soon
I wouldn’t be surprised if next gen high end vr headsets like Oculus and Vive use “inside out tracking” that doesn’t involve outside sensors.
I guess the htc standalone is still going to beat this in terms of usability and price.