Update: Earlier today Nate Mitchell took to Reddit to explain that the anticipated January update was “taking a little longer” than Oculus had expected. “We’re working to get it out to everyone as soon as possible. Appreciate everyone’s patience,” he said. “And yes, this means there’s very likely two updates in February.”
Original Story: There’s no denying Oculus Touch is a wonderful piece of kit, but over the past two months issues with tracking have reared their ugly heads.
We’ve seen multiple reports from Rift users across different channels about struggles with occlusion and range over the past few weeks. That essentially means people are moving their controllers out of the tracked area, despite fine tuning their setups. It creates an immersion-breaking disconnect when your virtual hands start jumping about either because you’ve reached too high or low, or turned out of the view of the sensors.
Every Rift comes with a tracking sensor and every Touch comes with another one, both of which should be placed near your PC. If you want to enable full room-scale tracking then you can also buy a third sensor, which should theoretically give your experience extra stability, but some people using either two and three sensor set ups still claim to have issues.
After weeks of requests, Oculus recently confirmed that an update is coming.
Nate Mitchell, an Oculus co-founder who now works on the Rift team at the Facebook-owned company took a rare trip to the Oculus subreddit to confirm that a January update for the Rift would feature “improvements to tracking, particularly for some multi-sensor configurations,” or, in other words, Touch users.
“We’re keeping a close eye on tracking quality, and we’ll continue addressing any issues we uncover as quickly as possible,” Mitchell wrote.
I’ve had tracking issues myself, so I can attest to the need for this update. The only question is how much can Oculus really do on the software side now that the hardware is finalized and available to all? We’re sure refinements can be made but a complete overhaul of the system might be out of the question. Perhaps the Touch setup guide could do a better job of showing how well your current configuration is tracking your controllers?
