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Oculus Founder Says Rift Can Match Valve's 'Room-Scale' VR (roadtovr.com) 36

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.'
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Oculus Founder Says Rift Can Match Valve's 'Room-Scale' VR

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    Who has 15'x11' to devote to blundering around blind? Am I supposed to empty out my living room mess with this thing?

    • You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.

      • by aliquis ( 678370 )

        You will. And the company that will bring it to you is AT&T.

        And you will pay RIAA a subscription fee for life-time so they get their share for ???

        • by no1nose ( 993082 )

          You will [youtu.be]

          • by aliquis ( 678370 )

            "Have you ever dreamed of capped slow Internet connection for a few?"

            Me neither. :D, Good thing I live in Sweden in that regard =P

        • by donaldm ( 919619 )
          Lets see:
          1. Room 15'x11' - check!
          2. Put on VR head set - check!
          3. Use voice to start game - check!
          4. Trip over carpet which you forgot to move and/or crash into wall and/or bash HDTV and/or - well you know the drill - Ouch!

          Litigation hell here we come :-)

          • by hlavac ( 914630 )
            This is actually solved by SteamVR - you set up an arbitrary shape space boundary that you can see inside the VR so that you dont bump into stuff ;)
            • by donaldm ( 919619 )

              This is actually solved by SteamVR - you set up an arbitrary shape space boundary that you can see inside the VR so that you dont bump into stuff ;)

              You are quite right, until someone in your house be it dog, cat, child, friend or wife/husband walks in and collects a flailing arm or leg.

              What I originally said was not that far from what will eventually happen. Lets put it this way do you honestly think everyone who uses a VR headset in a room will confine themselves to an arbitrary shaped boundary. Most would but you only need someone to get carried away and if there is an injury you are guaranteed to have litigation. You only need to look at some of th

    • And that's exactly the reason why Lighthouse isn't really interesting.. And according to some HTC employees the lighthouse system isn't working as well as the supplier promised..
      • You obviously have no idea how it works then.. You decide the size of your room, it doesn't have to be the max size..

  • Is there a reason there isn't a single link or source?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 15, 2015 @03:27AM (#51119823)

      It's right there colored green on top of the green background, possibly obscured by the icons depending on your browser windows size. Are you blind?

  • 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.
    • Obviously the ingame reality has to be setup so it matches the external borders.
      Sure, that puts restrictions on the game, but that is a problem for the makers to solve by getting creative, not the customer by running into walls.

    • Not true at all.. Think of a an airplane or spaceship cockpit
  • 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...

    • I don't care about room-scale VR, mostly because my office is so small that from where I'm sitting I can touch both walls on either side simultaneously.

      What I do care about is image quality. I'd really love to see one of these VRDs [avegant.com] with a better FOV and a better per-eye resolution, the whole getup looks lighter than the competing headsets because it doesn't need a screen.

      But what I'd really like is for actual product to be available to try out at my local computronics retailer, because no way am I buying on

  • 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

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • The consumer version is much better, and the Engineering samples we have are extremely close to the final product.

      It is a very nice kit.

  • All these VR headsets have a trail of wires sticking out from them. Even if you have free movement around a space, how's that going to work when you could potentially twist yourself around or trip over your own wires? Not to mention the danger of tripping over other hazards that enter that zone without your knowledge.

    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 o

  • by Anonymous Coward

    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.

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