After a small delay, Oculus’ much anticipated Rift update hit earlier this month, though for some it brought more issues than fixes. The company is looking to change that very soon, and this time without any other unforeseen problems.
Nate Mitchell of Oculus’ PC VR team recently took to the Oculus forums to give a brief update on the status of the next release, 1.12. He stated that the company’s current priority was to fix these new bugs, which many have cited as height tracking issues, “without reducing the impact of 1.11’s tracking quality improvements.”
The issues have mainly been ascribed to setups that use three or more sensors for room scale VR.
Oculus is still looking to release the update this month, but isn’t prepared to give a final date yet. “That’s because 1.12 is going through an expanded QA and testing process to make sure we haven’t overlooked any new issues,” Mitchell said. “As soon as it’s ready, we’ll ship it.”
Hopefully expanded QA will prevent any further issues with future updates, although Mitchell also revealed Oculus is considering an “early preview program” in which Rift owners would be able to test official updates before they fully launched, a little like how Sony offers beta testing for its system firmware updates on PlayStation 4. “This is something we’ve wanted to do for awhile, but has been on the back-burner behind other features,” Mitchell explained. “Hopefully, this should help us gather more community feedback and testing to help catch issues like this in the future.”
An update on this scheme should be coming “in the next few weeks.”
A small hotfix for online experiences is also on the way very soon, though it won’t have any updates to tracking included. With any luck, this update will allow Rift and Touch owners to finally put these tracking issues behind them.
