Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates
developer.oculus.com
developer.oculus.com
Fantastically impressed with things. Totally worth the $500. The games are amazing, but what is really impressing me is all the vr video content. The ability to "stand" on a stage while the orchestra plays Mozart all around you is mind blowing.
It is neat to see them pushing the boundaries with updates.
Doesn't seem like it'd be worth the trouble to do that for 500 bucks.
Generally the way this works is folks will buy CC info online for surprisingly cheap and then just focus on turning those into actual cash.
Buying things online, having them shipped to a vacant house, and then selling them for cash is a classic way to do this.
You buy something online, and it seems to be a reasonable price. Maybe 40% less than the listed price. So instead of paying $1000, you pay $600. Nice, you think. You scored a great bargain. You buy it, and the product gets shipped to you, all new and everything.
Fantastic! You think. You scored a great deal.
But behind the scenes, what happened is that seller bought it with a stolen credit card, at normal prices. Then sold it to you at the cheaper price. He pockets the $600. The vendor gets paid the $1000. But the guy whose stolen credit card got used, now gets hit with a mysterious $1000 bill. Poor guy. Now he has to file a police report, and claim that he didn’t make this fraudulent purchase, and turn his life upside down for a few months.
Sometimes, it’s best to not trust online sales.
You may be interested in the alternative (official) solution, which is not wireless but allows streaming PC VR games using "Oculus Link" using a compatible USBC cable. The cable that comes in the box is unfortunately USB2.0 (so not compatible), your best bet is to checkout this page: https://support.oculus.com/444256562873335/. The official Oculus cable has fibre-optic transceivers built in so is very expensive. Oculus lists some third-party cables on Amazon by Anker, which used by a lot of people (10 foot recommended, but the tiny 3 foot one is really cheap).
I haven't yet tried Virtual Desktop 5GHz streaming, but Oculus Link with a 3 foot cable streams perfectly (good for seated VR, which many PC games assume). I do want to try 5GHz Wifi streaming though! Untethered play is the best!
https://www.reddit.com/r/OculusQuest/comments/gjgcq0/oculus_...
Disclaimer: I work at Oculus but do not represent my employer on public forums. Opinions are my own.
Loading up the SideQuest APK was super easy and has now led me down the awesome rabbit hole of poking at Oculus dev :D
As mentioned, definitely make sure you're connected to the 5GHz hotspot if it's available -- it makes a big difference in my experience streaming a regular desktop with VirtualDesktop. Also as you might be aware, unlike regular 2.6GHz wifi, please remember that 5GHz signals don't penetrate objects (including walls, furniture) so your best bet to reduce potential lag (and thus nausea) is to make sure your Quest always line-of-sight to the router.
So, uh, I've only watched porn so far. Got a link of that orchestra? Sounds cool.
I own both and demoing my Rift on a high spec system my friends were blown away and the first question was "Can it run on my macbook?" Then thats where the idea of owning VR died for them.
Demoed my Quest and one person bought one within 2 minutes of taking the headset off, took his to a family BBQ and two more people there bought it after trying it for a few minutes.
I still enjoy many PCVR games but this is just reality.
Absolutely agree with this, literally anyone who can use the headset is able to sculpt a 3D model in Oculus Medium that resembles what they want. Same can't be said for any non-vr 3D modelling software, huge potential in the creative industries.
Still niche and not mainstream though.
PCVR is no more niche than the demographics for Far Cry 5. If you have the hardware to run a modern AAA game on PC, all you're really missing at that point is the headset. And I don't see Ubisoft refusing to make games for PC because there are too few people with powerful enough PCs. As GPU tech continues to develop and higher performance reaches lower price points, it'll also become more accessible to more people. Though you can already pay 200-250 Euros for a decent GPU now and it'll be more than sufficient for VR gaming.
High end PC is a small fraction of those installs.
Also, you could argue the hand tracking calculations could be done faster on a PC, so even if there is some perceived latency it could balance out or be better... would really need numbers for all of this, but it does just seem very suspect that they are trying to push more things on the Quest intentionally..
Consider the fact that the Rift-S has been out of stock for months. Oculus continues to re-stock the Quest (which sells out within 24h), but we haven't seen a restock of the Rift-S in probably 3 months?
Their "Del Mar" which is coming up, is very likely not going to be a tethered headset. My money is it will be standalone like the Quest.
Oculus is trying to get the masses to adopt VR and I salute them for it. There will always be headsets like the Valve index for enthusiasts.
These kinds of things are likely non-issues for your average gamer who isn't moving really fast, and isn't requiring ultra precise controls. For some people though, it's a huge deal breaker.
I'm personally very grateful for both Valve and Oculus. Oculus is serving the mass market, and doing a great job of it. I just hope in the process, we don't lose the high end consumer gear like Valve Index.
It's entirely possible if that Linux Tech Tips review was more than a month or two ago, things might look considerably different now.
He talks about "lag with lag compensation" when referring to some of the controls on the quest v.s. the rift-s
Hopefully that has improved, as I bought a quest and it arrives tomorrow! CV1 owner.
Also... Is Carmack still working on Oculus stuff? That's awesome. I got really sad when I heard he was leaving Oculus to work on general AI.
Perhaps the onboard hardware is capable of controller tracking as sold, but not powerful enough to enable Quest-style hand tracking. What if in addition to that, the camera data for one reason or another can't be piped over USB to the computer, either because it's missing the hardware that would do the encoding, or because there isn't enough bandwidth on the cable?
As I recall, the original Rift's outside-in tracking was extremely picky about having separate USB 3 ports for each of its tracking cameras, to the point where if you had a three-camera setup it didn't even want them on ports handled by the same USB controller on the motherboard.
Now we're saying "The Rift-S has five cameras and it's connected to the computer, surely it can just let the computer process that data." I doubt it's that easy.
My thinking is: The Rift S is 99.99% used for "serious" gaming and PCVR will always be that way. For serious gaming you'll probably need some kind of controllers for the near future, since you want that fidelity and haptic feedback. Now, controllers could be replaced some day by braceletes or what not, but this is not going to happen next year.
The Quest and its successors (i.e. stand-alone VR), on the other hand, is and will be more and more used for lighter gaming, video, browsing, productivity, fitness, social etc. Often times, hand-tracking will be enough without the need for controllers.
Therefore, they focus their resources on bringing hand-tracking only to the Quest.
It's doable, but you probably can't just drop the implementation for hand-tracking on one platform and have it work on the other.
I've given my Quest to countless people to try out and while every single person is blown away, many / most of them are challenged to use the controllers as anything more than simple pointing devices without significant training. With hand tracking that all goes away. You just use your hands how you normally use them and it "just works". It's similar to how the original iPhone captured everybody's imaginations because it offered such intuitive gestures to control its UI.
If you see the Quest as their "mass market" device and then you consider that their top priority is to knock over every barrier that stops it spreading like wildfire, then it's a no brainer to eliminate the controllers.
It feels like they're trying to exclude anyone who wants to play non-Oculus-published games.
It's in here somewhere. It's also extensively covered in the hour breakout session by the folks who implemented it, which is uploaded somewhere though I can't find the link atm.
So they rather doubled down on the more promising form factor
Demo: https://storage.googleapis.com/tfjs-models/demos/handpose/in...
Repo: https://github.com/tensorflow/tfjs-models/blob/master/handpo...
Tflite model: https://github.com/google/mediapipe/tree/master/mediapipe/mo... there is lighter 2d model as well
This paper came out several months before the iPhone X introduced Face ID with eye gaze tracking, so it can be seen as a hint of things that were to come.
What's intriguing to me is that the paper also talks about doing the same with synthetic depth maps of hands, adding details such as occlusion and imperfectly-captured edges. With Apple investing heavily in ARKit, and rumors of an AR headset, it seems like hand tracking is inevitable.
I wonder what it is that's keeping us from moving past these dull tech demos. Is the issue the interaction design being too simplistic ("Look, I can pick [thing] up!")? Or perhaps the opposite: that, without suitable haptics, too much energy has to be devoted to a very unnatural way of interacting (essentially with phantoms). It seems that games like BeatSaber and apps like TiltBrush have cracked the code, but you have to wonder how.