A recent update to Oculus Home may finally be the end to the debate that the Rift cannot do room-scale VR.
- Oculus Rift Review
- Oculus Home updated to version 1.6 with Automatic App Updates
- New Rift Content added to Oculus Home
The Rift previously doesn’t officially support room-scale experiences, that is utilising the entire surrounding room environment to emulate in virtual reality. The HTC Vive, however, is much better at doing this, and is one of the headset’s standout features. In fact, the lack of room-scale support has been one of the biggest comparison points when comparing the Rift and the Vive. The new update to Oculus Home will finally allow those wanting to utilise room-scale VR in support Steam games with the Oculus Rift.
Despite this added support, the experience won’t quite be on-par with the Vive given the lack of sensors compared to the Vive and the reduced detection of the room surroundings that come with this.
In addition, the Oculus Home update brings support to connect up to four tracking cameras that can be used to simultaneously track the headset and Touch controllers. Using four trackers can be seen demonstrated in the below video:
It means that the Rift can now be paired with more sensors to offer greater precision, and could also help with that room-scale issue we touched on. The Rift’s trackers do need to be connected to the tethered host PC via USB so get ready to purchase some long USB extenders to allow a tracker to be placed in the four corners of a room.
