Oculus Touch

sutekiB

The Oculus Touch. Not bundled with the Rift, but coming H1 '16





Features 6DOF tracking, haptic feedback, buttons, analogue stick, and gesture recognition. Thoughts?

xxann5

Not being released with the Rift is a deal breaker for me.

Finger gesture recognition? I could care less. Especially when it only recognized a thumbs up and your pointer finger... well pointing. Sure giving someone a thumbs up would be cool but there are currently bigger things to worry about in the VR space than finger recognition. I actually think the only reason they put that feture in for the first release was to differentiate Touch from lighthouse. If you take that feature out and compare the two they are just about identical in functionality.

I am somewhat confused about what Oculus was thinking not using Lighthouse for tracking. (I have been thinking about this for some time)

• It was a fully developed solution it only needed to be consumerized
  
• It is an elegant solution, It's computationally cheap. There is no hard limit to how many things you can track as it's inside-out tracking.
  
• Because it's inside-out tracking its private, you can use any lighthouse base station anywhere and the base station has no idea you're even there never mind where you are. (Public VR?)
  
• It's an open standard so it will(hopefully) be widely supported and compatibility with devices from multiple manufacturers will hopefully be a non-issue.
  

I think there are three possibilities for this.

1. Valve was not offering it to Oculus. I don't think this is the case as they have gone on record many times that it's an open platform that anyone can use and the only restriction is that they must adhere to the lighthouse standards, with i think is completely reasonable to ensure compatibility. I only put this in because there could be something in the contract with HTC that says HTC gets first dibs on it for launch of the Vive.
   
2. Oculus though the base stations would two costly and drive the price of the Rift up.
   
3. Oculus wanted something proprietary to set them apart, even though functionally of the two solutions are almost identical.
   

Personally i think it's a bit from bullet 2 and 3.

But whatever the case currently my mind is made up, I will be getting the Vive. Unless something drastically changes in the next few months.

giroudf

seems the rift CV1 to be a total failure, at least for those expecting better than another device for the xbox.....
I expect a lot of disappointed people to cancel all their purchases related to VR (C, video cards, 360 cameras, omni, body capture suits, rift etc...) and the oculus rift to be another "virtual boy".

xxann5

Well I think "failure" and "another "virtual boy"" are a bit harsh.

I dont think that CV1 will be a total failure. However I think Oculus is now targeting the more mainstream market. I can understand why they are doing that, especially with Facebook backing them. But i don't think the Rift is for me or many of the people that are eagerly anticipating VR. Thankfully there is the Vive which is apears to be exactly what I, and allot of other people are looking for in a VR setup.

blazespinnaker

I think the touch looks great. Hopefully Valve can do something competitive.

xxann5

@blazespinnaker I am confused, Valve already has, they first released it at the 2015 CES it's currently called lighthouse. Its not as nearly as pretty as half moon but i am interested to see if they change the aesthetics for the consumer release. Though to be perfectly honest I could care less. I have always been a function-over-form kind of guy myself and i think that is even more the case as you won't actually be seeing the controllers in VR or if you do see them you could make them look like anything you want.