In a tweet this evening, Oculus founder Palmer Luckey confirmed that the Oculus Rift will be able to work with a room scale style tracking setup, with cameras at the corners of the room.
Earlier this year at E3, we showed you that the Oculus Rift consumer edition would be able to track a room-sized space, meaning that you can walk around in the space of a room on the Rift, similarly to how you would with the HTC Vive. In that demonstration, however, the Rift’s constellation tracking system cameras were both positioned in the front of the room. The setup helped with situations where the Oculus Touch controllers might occlude each other, but it came with the downside of not allowing easy full 360-degree motion with the Touch controls. Turning around and blocking their view from the cameras caused the controllers to lose their tracking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXrJu-zOzm4
Presumably positioning the cameras at the corners of the room would potentially allow for a full room scale trackable solution. According to Luckey, the solution is “limited by the size of the room, not the sensors” and his setup currently tracks a room space that is about “15 x 11 feet,” suggesting that the trackable area could be even larger.
Luckey says that the setup “works fine,” but did not elaborate further on how fine exactly. It is likely that the setup will lead to some minor pain points because it is not necessarily how it was designed to work. We have reached out for further comment and will update this post with any new news.
UPDATE: Palmer Luckey took to reddit to say that there are in fact occlusion issues with this particular setup, and reiterated that room scale type experiences aren’t going to be a go to, calling them a “fantasy that few games will utilize.”
See the full quote here:
