It’s the first day of GDC and lots of VR companies are making lots of announcements about the future of VR. Oculus’ big announcement of the day, however, should be in people’s hands either now or very soon.
Facebook’s VR team is now rolling out the promised 1.12 update, eagerly awaited by Rift owners that have been experiencing tracking issues since the 1.11 update earlier this month. The news was announced by the company’s Nate Mitchell over on the Oculus forums.
Many owners have reported having issues with Oculus’ experimental room-scale setups, which utilize three of its sensors and its Oculus Touch controllers. Mitchell noted that, based on the company’s testing, “we believe 1.12 should improve tracking quality”, especially those more elaborate setups. Note the careful wording; Oculus is clearly keen to avoid making bold claims after the 1.11 update led to further issues.
1.12 was beta tested by members of the community, something Oculus pledged to look into between these previous two updates. Today’s improvements will be arriving in stages, so if you haven’t already downloaded it be on the lookout for it to arrive a little later on. Hopefully there won’t be any further issues and VR owners can finally put these issues behind them.
Elsewhere, 1.12 is a relatively inconsequential update. Oculus Home users can now label reviews as spam if necessary, and a problem with first booting up the software has been fixed. There are also specific fixes for both Unity and Unreal Engine content, which takes up a large amount of VR apps at this point in time.
Specifically, issues with freezing and black screens in Unity have been fixed along with texture and color rendering issues. On the UE4 side, issues with Asynchronous SpaceWarp have been fixed, as has a rendering efficiency issue.
We’ll have plenty more from Oculus at GDC this week, so stay tuned.
