as far as the rift is concerned wouldn't the rift need an internal camera that could see your eyes... and if so wouldn't the lenses be occluding the line of sight to the iris?
I think it's because the Oculus Unity integration comes with a player controller prefab that has this control scheme set up by default.
And I believe the reason for having the "move where you look" scheme is because the alternative is moving where your "virtual body" is facing, and unless the developer puts some work into constructing a visual body or frame of reference of some sort, any small amount of yaw drift (if they didn't calibrate) is going to make the user lose track of where the virtual body is facing, and start sliding to the side a little bit when they wanted to move forward. Sliding to the side a little instead of moving perfectly forward in the direction you expected to move is another sure way to induce nausea for many, apparently!
Having forward connected to where you look is a quick band-aid to the problem arising from drift, but I totally agree with you -- it's pretty unnatural and makes it hard to "look around" while moving in a particular direction. There's been lots of other experimental control schemes that deal with this. One that comes to mind is how Kairo does it -- that game very gradually moves your "forward" to the direction you're looking as supposed to keeping them in sync... so you could be moving down some path and briefly look around without getting off track.
Titans of Space PLUS for Quest is now available on DrashVR.com
I can see a future where theres stores (cough infinite realities cough) with the sole purpose of selling you a scanned 3d model of yourself for those kind of apps. Edition of it to make you fitter/prettier costs extra of course. :)
Glad I got my DK1 out of the way. Guess we'll see how bad it gets. Least there are other VR products on the way in case this ends up being as lame as it sounds.
You certainly could have a smartwatch/phone/etc display a fiducial marker on its screen, which would let you track it pretty accurately. Then, with some difficulty, you could fuse that with the IMU in the watch to get it to be fairly responsive.
Still, those phone cameras don't have great FOV. You would only be able to track it with it is pretty much right in front of your face. Lower it below shoulder level and its gone.
