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Oculus Rift officially supports the HTC Vive’s best feature
The Oculus Rift has technically supported room-scale VR since the system's Touch motion controllers first went on sale last December. But purchasing an additional sensor didn't guarantee foolproof 3D tracking for greater immersion right off the bat. Oculus labelled the feature "experimental," alerting early adopters to the likelihood of bugs and other gremlins you might expect from in-development functionality. Six months and several updates later, however, Oculus has decided room-scale support is robust enough in its latest software release that it can ditch the beta tag and be called a bona fide Rift feature.
Oculus explains how room-scale VR taxes your USB ports
We've been dealing with USB for about two decades now, and to be honest, we're not usually asking that much from it. Plug in an adapter, microphone or game controller, then keep it moving. All of that changes, however, when it comes to virtual reality. As Oculus explains, plugging in a bunch of room scale sensors sends enough data through the ports to potentially overwhelm the 400MB/s capacity of the controller chip on your motherboard. Because of this, the answer isn't to simply plug in a hub and get more high-speed USB 3.0 ports, in fact, Oculus says you should probably get good results by using two USB 3.0 connections, plus one older USB 2.0 port if you need to go beyond two sensors to get some more mobility in your VR experiences. The blog is currently helping gamers get through the setup process, so go ahead and check out all of the posts to make sure everything is positioned and working correctly.
An extra $79 turns the Oculus into a room-scale VR system
At Oculus Connect 3, the VR company announced room-scale support for its upcoming Touch controllers. To enable the feature users will need a third sensor in the room for an additional $79.
Oculus update preps Rift for room-scale VR, motion controls
When virtual reality fanatics argue about what headset is best, two arguments tend to prevail: "The Oculus Rift is more comfortable," and "only the HTC Vive does roomscale VR." Soon, that second argument won't matter as much. Thanks to a recent update, the Rift's Oculus Home software now boasts support for up to four tracking sensors -- doubling one of the basic requirements the hardware needs to be used for accurate, room-scale virtual reality.
