The Oculus Touch motion-tracked controllers are launching on December 6th after eight months of the Rift solely supporting gamepad experiences. I wanted to take a moment to dig into some of the more subtle technical nuances when comparing the Oculus Rift & Touch with the HTC Vive, but also some of the larger VR ecosystem considerations to take into account. So today’s episode of the Voices of VR podcast is an op-ed analysis comparing the Touch controller and room-scale tracking technologies, as well as the overall content and developer ecosystems.
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In terms of industrial design and ergonomics, I do prefer the Rift’s head-mounted display over the Vive’s HMD. There has also been a lot of praise for the ergonomics of the Touch controllers, and I do agree that they a lot more comfortable than the Vive’s lighthouse wands. However, Oculus’ camera-based tracking system was not optimized to support full room-scale VR experiences, and TESTED has confirmed that a diagonally-configured, two-camera Oculus sensor setup is not as robust as the Vive’s lighthouse beacons.
Oculus’ tracking system is really optimized for “standing 360” VR experiences that are specifically designed for their front-facing cameras. Robert McGregor has argued that Oculus wasn’t prepared for room-scale VR when they launched the Rift CV1, and that they had made a strategic bet that most people would be playing VR games sitting down in front of their computer. This strategic bet has hampered Oculus with their decision to go with shorter cables for both the Rift headset as well as their sensor cameras. These work great for forward-facing standing 360 experiences on your desktop, but the cord management logistics and camera-based tracking volumes are highly suboptimal for achieving a fully robust, room-scale experience.
This thread on the Oculus subreddit discusses more of the technical differences in tracking capabilities between the two systems. I think it’s important to remember in comparing the Rift with the Vive that a lot of the Touch launch content has been specifically optimized for front-facing, standing 360 experiences. I’ve had multiple developers tell me that Oculus has had developers change their experiences to avoid limitations in their tracking solutions such as picking things up off of the floor because the Touch can easily loose tracking when you touch the ground. So to really push the limits of Oculus’ room-scale capabilities, then it should be compared to a variety of Vive room-scale games from Steam that allow for an equal comparison.
This is made possible because Valve decided to take an open development philosophy in having their SteamVR SDK support both the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift hardware. This means that Vive games bought on Steam will have automatic support for the Rift, but that same game bought on Oculus Home won’t support being able to play it on the Vive. The important point is that SteamVR’s support for Rift games enables people to test the same game out on the different platforms.
I unfortunately ran into a number of technical issues with my Oculus Touch set-up that prevented me from testing the limits of Oculus’ camera-based tracking, and so I’m going to have to reserve my final judgment on this matter. But I think it’s important to remember some of these VR design nuances and limitations when comparing the two systems.
The Oculus Touch controllers do have more buttons that are available for gameplay and professional applications than on the initial Vive controllers. This means that the Oculus gaming content has easier access to these buttons for abstracted expressions of your will. A lot of the VR games on the Vive have avoided this level of button abstraction, and I believe that there’s a tradeoff in different levels of presence that these buttons can cultivate. The Vive focuses you more on embodied presence while the Oculus has a bit more capabilities for an abstracted, active presence.
It’ll be interesting to see in the long-run whether this abstraction advantage enables more rich gameplay on the Oculus platform or if players prefer the types of experiences that minimize the abstractions and maximize the number of intuitive movements. Having user interfaces with complicated button manipulation combinations could limit VRs reach beyond gamers, and so it’s a risk that VR developers create experiences with too high of a learning curve. But having access to more buttons could also enable richer gameplay mechanics for some VR games.
The other big point that I wanted to make is that Valve opened up royalty-free lighthouse tracking back in August, and so I expect to see a lot of new lighthouse peripherals launching at CES. There was not a similar announcement from Oculus at Oculus Connect 3, which solidifies my impression that the Vive is actively cultivating an open ecosystem while Oculus is going down a more closed, walled garden route. They’re focusing more on vertically-integrated solutions with a highly-curated selection of exclusive games, which prioritizes the benefits to the end-consumer rather than supporting a diverse developer ecosystem. It’s enabled Oculus to launch with a robust line-up of games, but time will tell as to which ecosystem the VR developers will be investing their time in supporting in the future. For some developers, a minimum viable product is going to be to launch their game via Steam for the Vive as a first-class platform with Rift support as an automated afterthought.
At the moment owning an Oculus Rift headset with Touch arguably gives you access to more content if you include their exclusive content as well as the Vive content that’s automatically supported on Steam. However, there may be potential limitations of Oculus’ tracking technology in viably supporting some of the full room-scale experiences, which may hamper some people’s experiences of that Vive content. It’s also unclear as to whether or not Rift users will be able to fully utilize the new lighthouse peripherals that are expected to launch next year.
From a VR design perspective, I believe that Oculus’ decision to wait eight months to launch Touch controllers as well as not natively supporting room-scale experiences has fractured the VR developer ecosystem into three distinct groups: Sit-down gamepad VR, Front-facing Standing 360, and full room-scale VR. The lack of tracking parity between the Rift and the Vive has a created complicated and fractured ecosystem for VR developers to navigate since there are so many tradeoffs depending on which group is targeted.
While there is a lot of press consensus that the Oculus hardware with the Rift HMD and Touch controllers enjoy an ergonomic advantage at the moment, I personally have deeper concerns about Oculus’ inferior tracking technology, the fractured ecosystem that’s being propagated through not making room-scale a first-class citizen, and a number of private developer frustrations with Oculus’ closed mindset. These are larger issues that make it more difficult for VR developers to easily support both hardware platforms, and ensure a healthy ecosystem of content development.
In the end, mainstream VR has a higher chance of success if VR developers can financially survive, and that the quality bar for content is high enough for consumers justify the time and money invested. Time will tell how the story plays out, but right now the Touch launch is a significant day for Rift consumers who have been waiting to fully step into the game since that promise was made in the original Oculus Kickstarter.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So Oculus is launching their touch controllers on December 6th and there's the press embargo that lifted today so there's a lot of different reviews and commentary and on today's episode I just wanted to synthesize some of the big thoughts that are out there and points that I thought were salient but also contextualize this a little bit more and maybe go into a little bit more of the details that weren't covered in a lot of the different reviews although they're there were some that did talk about some of the larger ecosystem implications. But there's also other things that weren't being talked about that I just wanted to discuss here a little bit as well. So first of all, I did actually have access to the Dutch controllers and unfortunately I personally ran into some technical difficulties and at this point I don't know if they are isolated to me or if there's a larger issue. So I'm hesitant to go into too much of the nuances of what I personally experienced because I don't know how representative it is for the larger VR community. Aside to just say that I didn't get a chance to actually do a full technical review of the touch controllers in my own environments. However, I have used the touch controllers within the context of different conferences and expos, as well as Oculus Connect 3. I've also read through a lot of the different reviews that are out there. Also just talked to different developers. So I just wanted to kind of synthesize all that and to talk about things a little bit. So first of all, the ergonomics of the touch controllers is probably the strongest strength. And if you look at the reviews, it's universally understood that the touch controllers feel just a lot better than the existing first iteration of the HTC Vive controllers. That said, I know that at Steam Dev Days, Steam was showing some ergonomics of being able to hold something that is similar to Oculus Touch, although you're able to completely open up your hands. And I think that could actually leapfrog where the touch controllers are at this point. depending on when that comes out and when that's made available. So that actually brings me to the next point, which is that the Vive actually opened up lighthouse tracking to royalty-free availability, so that at CES this year, I expect to see just a ton of different peripherals from a lot of different companies, and I think that's actually going to drive a lot of innovation and gameplay. Oculus did not actually make a compatible announcement at Oculus Connect 3. I was actually really surprised that they didn't open up their constellation tracking. And so at this point, while the Oculus Touch controller may be superior to the Vive, I think long term in the ecosystem, Vive actually has a pretty huge advantage of the developer ecosystem and the different software that's out there. One of the things I wanted to really point out and highlight on the touch controllers though is that they also have these extra buttons, the A, B, X, Y buttons, as well as the other menu buttons that are on the touch controllers. So the Vive also has a couple of buttons and grip controllers, but frankly, most people don't use them in the actual gameplay. And so at Oculus Connect with the Unspoken game, I think that was probably one of the games that I think I could see how there is a lot of new gameplay capabilities that were opened up with the Oculus Touch controllers. And so while there may be buttons on both the Touch and the Vive controllers, I think Oculus actually opens up a lot of gameplay capabilities that are not going to be as easily portable to the Vive. And so A lot of people talk about wanting to have games that are not exclusive so that the developer has to develop a game and be able to have it on all the different platforms. So I think there's actually going to be some games that are going to be very specific to the Oculus Touch because they're just going to have the buttons that are available that are going to be able to just be a better gameplay experience. So for example, The Unspoken is a great example of a game that I'm not sure how well that would translate to the Vive. given that you're kind of fully using all the different buttons there as well. This brings up just a larger question philosophically as to whether or not you actually want to have a lot of button gameplay within a VR experience. I think Valve's approach has been to kind of go this route of having just less abstraction You're kind of eliminating that and you're just more intuitively moving your body. I think that actually is an approach that gives them more of an embodiment type of presence. Whereas the touch controllers with the buttons actually allows you to exert your will and experience in new and different ways. And so it's actually focusing more on active presence in a way. Now, in terms of active presence and actually physically moving around, I think that Oculus actually has a disadvantage because they're encouraging and almost forcing developers to do front-facing support. If you have a game that is being delivered through Oculus Home, then you absolutely have to support front-facing cameras. If you want to do something that you don't have to change your gameplay, then you actually may deliver your game through Steam and still be able to play it on Oculus. This actually gets into some of the open versus closed mindsets between Valve and Oculus. So Valve is taking a very open approach. You know, you can look at Steam as their primary mechanism to selling games. If they want to sell a lot of games, then if the games are compatible with both the Rift and the Vive, then they have the potential to sell more software in that way. So the SteamVR SDK actually natively, if you just pop in the SDK and create a game with the Vive, then it's also going to be supporting the Rift. You can plug in your Rift and all the hardware and you can fire up Steam and start playing some of these VR games that were designed for the Vive. Now, there may be some nuances in terms of, you know, whether or not fully optimized in terms of how you're holding your hands, but more or less you can do that. But that is not the same if you go to Oculus Home. If you purchase a game on Oculus Home, even if it's the same game, you're not going to be able to actually fire up a Vive and be able to play that version of that game. And so they're taking a much more closed approach. And so there's certainly a lot of exclusives to Oculus that don't even have the availability to be able to sell on Steam. So you can't play it on the Vive. So they just have some software that's more available. However, there's a tracking issue here that I just wanted to point out. Right now, by default, Oculus is coming up with two front-facing cameras. With the Lighthouse trackers, you can actually kind of stand right below it and still get tracking. And based upon what other reviewers and people are saying is that basically, you cannot do the same thing with Oculus cameras, that if you stand right below an Oculus camera, you're going to lose tracking. So one of the things that I've heard from DR developers is that one of the limitations of the tracking technology for the Rift is that you actually kind of lose tracking if you touch the ground too much, just because it's not going to be as reliable, just the way that the field of view of the camera is tracking. I think a lot of the launch titles that are out there, a lot of the reviews, are not going to necessarily be testing that because the gameplay is not going to be encouraging that as much. So I think there are some games that are on Steam and designed for the Vive, and that's going to be yet another difference to see. I haven't personally had a chance to be able to test this out yet, but I would encourage some people to go out, and if you have a Rift, to be able to see what the tracking is like when you actually get low to the ground a little bit, because I think that the tracking at this point for the touch is meant mostly for you to be standing up and not necessarily doing much on the ground at all. And so what that means is that if you essentially buy a Rift, have your Rift tracking, and try to play a lot of the fully room scale games, and you have your same configuration that's recommended from the Vive, where you basically have two cameras in the corners, If you try to do that setup, according to Tested, that's going to drop tracking a lot and you actually have to do their recommended tracking, which is essentially putting the cameras front-facing and parallel to each other. And so Oculus at Oculus Connect 3 announced that they are supporting room scale so that you have to buy another camera. The downside is that the cord management for Oculus Rift is just sub-optimal. they were really designed for putting them directly on your desktop, right next to your computer. They're not really the cord link that you need, so you have to buy cord links, and then you have to stream them out, and there's actually a VR developer on YouTube called Reality Check VR, and he actually has like four Oculus cameras mounted to the ceiling, and all these extra cords, but that is like an extreme example. I don't think most people are gonna be able to do that. I think most people are gonna set up their cameras on a table. So another thing to point out here is that based upon what I've heard from different developers is that all the games that are currently being sold through Oculus Home have to support the front-facing arrangement and that at this point the 360 camera is experimental so it's kind of up to the developer whether or not they want to support that. I think most of the actual full room scale games that are 360 are going to probably be through Steam. If you actually purchase that third camera, then I would expect most of the full room scale type of experiences to be through Steam and not Oculus Home, just based upon from what I've heard from developers. And again, I haven't been able to actually test that. And I also haven't seen a lot of other reviewers who've actually tested that three camera configuration. It's at this point still an experimental feature, so I'm not even sure if it's officially supported at this point. So I wanted to call out an article that Robert McGregor posted back in January of 2016 and it's called, Oculus wasn't repaired for room scale with the Rift CV1. And I think this is probably the most lucid argument and story narrative that I've seen laid out as to kind of what's happened over the last couple of years. And the narrative is essentially that Oculus was making the strategic bet that room-scale VR was not going to be a thing, that most people were not going to want to have to go through all the trouble of doing that. And so they really went with a technology stack that was designed for sitting in front of your computer. Now, when the Vive came out and launched with these full room-scale experiences, people immediately recognized the presence multiplier that that gives. And even Oculus for a long time, for the first couple of years, was really recommending people to sit down and that this is a sit-down experience. That could have been for liability reasons or for whatever the reasons were. When you actually went to Oculus Connect 1 and Oculus Connect 2, all of the Oculus demos were with people standing up because standing up in VR actually is a huge presence multiplier. And they saw that, but yet I think that they have been betting on that most people weren't going to want to, A, dedicate the space to be able to set up RoomScale, and B, go through the trouble of setting it all up. And so basically we've got this situation where Oculus made the strategic decision to go ahead and launch, really recommending people to sit down and that this is a sit-down experience with an Xbox controller. And the Vive has been out there for eight months with full room scale motion track controllers. And so the risk here, I think overall, is looking at kind of like this fractured ecosystem that we have at the moment that are basically like three major different types of VR experiences. There's the room scale experiences from the Vive. Then there's Oculus's version of the room scale, which isn't actually room scale. It's what they would call standing 360, where you're standing up and you might be able to spin 360 degrees around if you have that third camera. but it's not full room scale. They're kind of designing the experiences so that you actually really want to be facing forward. And then there's the experiences where you're kind of sitting down with the Xbox controller. I think in the long run, there's going to be some genre of games, whether it's you're flying fighter pilot jets or maybe race car games or other action games like, you know, Lucky's Tale is a good example. It's a great game with Xbox controller, but I don't think that's necessarily going to be the strength of VR. I think the strength of VR is going to be with these motion track controllers, I think. The attachment rates for the Oculus Touch are going to be pretty significant and pretty large because it's going to really flesh out that platform. There's a risk that Oculus isn't shipping with it, you know, you have to add it on. And so there's a potential consumer issue there where if they buy a Rift and it doesn't come with everything that you actually need to have a full experience, then that's an issue. And then kind of throwing in a third camera with a setup where you actually kind of have to do a completely different software design in order to really support that, and that if most of the experiences are doing front-facing, then it just has created this fractured ecosystem in some extent. So the Rift was never really designed with room scale in mind and in fact if you do try to do some of the room scale experiences then I think some people are going to find that the cord that is going to the Rift and all the cords that are going to the camera sensors weren't really designed to be able to set it up for what you really actually need for a room scale experience. They're really designed for front-facing and that design choice that they made I think in the long term is going to be very technically limiting. One of the other design decisions that Oculus made that was a surprise to me when I got the Oculus Touch controllers was that it actually requires AA batteries. And it felt like a little bit of a slap of the face to me just be like, oh wow, there's just one more thing that I have to take care of. With the Vive, you just plug it in and there's batteries in there and it's just like easy. You don't have to worry about buying either rechargeable batteries or having a stock of AA batteries to be able to put into your controllers. So that was a surprising decision that they decided to go with that rather than something that you could recharge. So I think time will tell in terms of the ecosystems that are going to be developing for these two platforms. So Oculus Launch, there's a lot of really robust content that's available that I think has probably got a lot of pretty deep gameplay, perhaps some more deeper gameplay than some of the titles that are available on the Vive at this point. So in terms of pure gaming, there's going to be a great amount of different content that is available for people to really dive into and to explore. I think it's just more of a long term sustainability of their ecosystem. And I think it's hard to make a judgment at this point. And I think, you know, a year out, I think we're going to know a lot more as to how that ecosystem has continued to develop. There's a lot more limitations that I think developers have to go through in order to support the tracking sensor technology for Oculus at this point. And so in terms of the minimum viable products, sometimes it may actually be easier to develop for the HTC Vive. And I think that it's just going to be a matter of how those ecosystems continue to develop. And philosophically, whether or not you want to support an ecosystem that is fully open, or whether or not you want to go into a little bit more of the closed system that may actually have more deeper exclusive content. And so there's this kind of tension between the open and closed that's going to continue to play out. And I think that they're going to be a good competition for each other. I personally am really curious to see where the additional lighthouse tracking peripherals and other new tracking technology that's going to be coming out likely around CES this year. I hope to see a lot of the new lighthouse peripherals that are going to be announced and coming out into the new year. And that'll be in January and I'll be there covering that as well. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy this type of analysis and synthesis, then please do become a donor to my Patreon. Just a few dollars a month really does make a huge difference, especially if everyone contributes. And if you enjoy this as a service to you and the wider VR community, then become a donor at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
