The upcoming new Oculus stand-alone will be wireless with inside-out tracking:
as will Vive Focus:
Seems I was wrong here too! The new dash doesn’t necessarily pause the game - Lone Echo switches to the pause screen by design I guess. And X Rebirth actually keeps going in the background when the dash is open (so I switch to virtual desktop while it’s loading).
I noticed that in From Other Suns, calling up the virtual desktop doesn’t pause the game! So you can basically ‘alt tab’ using the Oculus button to move focus to a pinned desktop window, and use it while still inside the game. So awesome!
This now seems to work as a launcher! Pop a cartridge in and a virtual HMD appears above the console, put it over your head and the game launches. Hardly more convenient than pointing and clicking using the dash quick menu, but still…
I also tested the ‘revert’ functionality - you can switch between the old and new dashes by clicking a single button in the beta options. So no reason not to try it out! (though Windows 10 is required for Virtual Desktop and overlays. Also minimum of AMD: 17/11/2, NVIDIA: 388.31 drivers)
Roger, you just blew my mind. I knew -nothing- about this technology and have been reading some links on it. This would be a game changer, for me at least.
I don’t understand why we don’t use something like VR gloves. Is so obvious. The position of fingers would be very easily controlled that way, so we would import a lot of body language into the game world.
I thought Valve was working on a controller that does so.
Edit: it’s the Knuckles controller I was thinking of.
Probably because it’s not as simple as ‘hey let’s use gloves’. Oculus showed some prototype tech earlier last year:
“Unfortunately, hands have about 25 degrees of freedom and lots of self-occlusion. Right now, retroreflector-covered gloves and lots of cameras are needed to get to this level of tracking quality.”
Taken from blog page sharing Michael Abrash’s talk to Global Grand Challenges Summit, well worth a read:
What you really need is some kind of sprung gauntlet, so you can just track the hand’s physical position/orientation in a gross manner and have the fingers be self-tracking for how clenched they are. But that would be uncomfortable, and wouldn’t really offer much benefit over what the current Touch controllers do, which is surprisingly effective - thumb up/down, index in/out and fist open/closed.
I just wish these companies would adopt the same, standard controller, whether it’s the Touch controller, or Vive, or whatever Mixed Reality is using… make it dead-simple easy for devs to write a VR control scheme once, play anywhere. Look at what happened with Fallout 4 and the effort it takes making the game work properly with Touch controllers. Ridiculous.
At a minimum, make them all similar… the controllers on the PS and XBox are similar enough that little effort is required when making cross-platform games. Why can’t we have the same with VR?
end of rant.
I think that’s a good goal, but I don’t think we’re there yet in terms of the maturity of the platform/technology. It’d suck if every game these days still had to conform to a one button joystick or two button NES gamepad. :)
I think we still have many years of shaking out control schemes, some of which might be radically different (like a glove/gauntlet).
That must be pretty powerful.
In PSVR you can play with the controller in “Virtual Worlds” and the feedback of using the controller to poke a floating ball in the main menu is amazing.
A haptic controller may allow crazy thing like playing music, or using virtual keyboards :D
I’m assuming hapticporn dot com is already registered.
[quote=“Djscman, post:1708, topic:77265”]
What is inside out tracking? That must be different from coco tracking.[/quote]
Hah. Inside-out tracking means you don’t need external sensors all around the place to track your position. The current HTC and Oculus devices require you to stay within the boundaries of your sensor system. With inside-out tracking, those boundaries go away.
Unfortunately, your room’s walls do not go away.I’m far more constrained by available space than sensor range.
I just saw this in my timeline on twitter
Apparently some VR gym thing. It would be interesting to see, but I don’t think I’d like to subject my hmd to all the sweat generated from working out.
There is tech that will briefly superimpose objects from the real world into your virtual world so that you don’t go hitting / walking / tripping over things.
It’s a good compromise between immersion and banging your knees and knuckles. Requires a bit more processing (and image transfer from the HMD back to the PC so that it’s rendered in) but well worth it IMO.
Hopefully we can begin to see more of this with Inside Out becoming far more prevalent.
One of the benefits of true Inside Out Tracking is that you’re not limited to just a single room. With high quality IO tracking, every single room can be mapped in real time as needed.
Of course at that point if you’re still tethered to a powerful gaming PC that doesn’t really matter, but it’s just one more hurdle overcome on the way to truly self-contained AR/VR.
Once that tech is self-contained, I give it three days before some idiot runs over someone while using a headset while driving.
There’s supposed to be some announcement re Vive on the 8th. New model maybe?