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Oculus Founder Says Rift Can Match Valve's 'Room-Scale' VR (roadtovr.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Valve and HTC have touted 'room-scale' VR -- a large tracking volume for virtual reality experiences -- as a major advantage of SteamVR and the Vive headset. But Oculus says that their choice to focus on seated and standing VR experiences in smaller spaces is one of practicality, not technological limitations. To hush the haters, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey says he arranged the Rift tracking sensors in the same orientation of Valve's 'Lighthouse' trackers and concluded that tracking in a ~15x11 space 'works fine.'
Who has 15'x11' to devote to blundering around blind? Am I supposed to empty out my living room mess with this thing?
Umm... OK.
Is there a reason there isn't a single link or source?
Please help metamoderate.
How about you just ship something already so we can see for ourselves, huh?
All this talk is nice and good but if nobody can actually have the product for another year, it hardly matters.
Having X feet of roaming room is pointless. You will never have enough room and when you reach your physical boarders in the game it will completely ruin the immersion. It won't be an immersive VR experience, it will be gimmicky just like Wii and Xbox Kinect.
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Oculus aren't focusing on room-scale VR so it won't work as well as Vive's. If you don't test it in a particular scenario, you don't find out and fix what doesn't work in a particular scenario. The CEO trying it late in the game and "it's fine" doesn't really count as testing...
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Floor-space requirements were a fairly big issue for people with Kinect. The first generation of the device in particular was a bit of a stickler for having a room with the right dimensions and, in particular, the ability to get around 10 feet distance from the sensor. That meant problems for a lot of people who had their TV along the long-edge of their living room, opposite the sofa. Their choices were to a) reconfigure the living room furniture or b) not bother with Kinect. Unsurprisingly, many just went with b). The requirement in many early Kinect titles for the player to jump up and down like a madman was also a bit of an issue for a lot of people who lived in apartment buildings with downstairs neighbours.
So on that basis, I'm inclined to side with HTC on this one. It's better to adapt to the practical environments of people's homes than to go for the "technically" optimal solution. Particularly given that Valve's approach is only a stopgap anyway; it's not much use being able to move anywhere in your living room while playing if the area your avatar is in in-game is the size of a football field. Unless, of course, living room is the size of a football field. Mine isn't.
But I am getting a bit bored of these endless VR willy-waving debates without any consumer hardware actually on the shelves to buy. I was really hoping we'd see that during 2015. Guess not...
A modification of a product you can't buy! (and yes the dev kit doesn't count since the final consumer version is apparently so much better).
'Room-Scale' is the VR equivalent of webscale. These VR companies need to stfu until they actually start shipping consumer units instead of going on and on for years about how great their non-shipping products are.
there's zero chance i'll ever have anything to do with any vr product under the facebook umbrella.
so i don't care what you have. piss off.
At the least it'd be useful if tracking tech was able to detect other people or animals entering the zone and by default pause the game to mitigate against the chances of the user colliding or tripping over them.
American idiot.
The entire field of VR is a waste of time. The disconnect between what the inner ear is seeing vs what the eye is seeing is going to cause nausea in the majority of people. The best you can do at this point is augmented reality.