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.
I've tried both methods and move where you look seems more natural. Disconnecting player movement from view is more reminiscent of driving a tank not walking around. When we walk in real life we spend 90% of our time looking in the approximate direction we are moving. Generally stopping to look around. Spending most of our time looking in a different direction to movement is.... *LAMPPOST*... usually dangerous.
I think this is more connected with our movements.
When you walk forward, your head is oriented forward aswell. You look forward and your neck isn't twisted in any direction. If you want to look somewhere (ex. left, just for a moment to see something) you don't rotate your whole body to look there, you just twist your head for a second. Probably this is the issue enilcleahcim mentioned about.
I agree, moving where you look is completely unnatural. I don't have my Rift yet, but I can imagine this to be completely unpractical.
"enilcleahcim" wrote: It's the most unnatural thing in the world. If I'm walking forward and I look slightly to the left at something, I don't want to walk towards it. And yet it seems like EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. of these friggin games makes you walk in the direction you're looking. STOP IT.
To me it feels more natural that way, and honestly, it's not that hard to write your own control system. A basic first person controller can be done with only a few lines of code in unity. Either way, it doesn't take much reference to see where you are going. For instance, in a demo I uploaded a while ago, I simply had a red cube to show direction. (currently in my unreleased demo, it has an arrow)
This box could easily be replaced by something else, like the hud (for instance, minecrift. Minecrift is one of the best experiences of hud in a game that I've played so far) I felt better using my own system then I ever did with games that do the walk where you look (like mirror's edge, feels so weird in that game.)
The flip side of this is that any other direction of movement is entirely arbitrary and forces users to keep track of a direction that may not be immediately obvious. This, in turn, adds cognitive overhead to the control scheme - instead of simply looking where they want to go they now have to consciously stay aware of another direction. When you start looking at how people use it, they usually tend to completely ignore that direction and get confused/annoyed when they are moving in some arbitrary direction instead of where they want to go (which is usually where they are looking).
Neither one is optimal, to be quite honest, so really it comes down to what the user is most comfortable with. The best thing to do is offer both choices.
That said, there are a few games that support moving in different directions. I know the Valve games do (TF2/HL2/HL:S) supports moving in the aim direction, and Quake II VR does as well.
Using a joystick to walk is already pretty unnatural. There isn't a "correct" answer here, its just going to be user preference, and the majority of people seem to prefer forward = head direction. When you are sitting you can't really make subtle turns with your body as you would when walking, so making them with your head feels somewhat normal. Valve did some user testing that came to the same conclusion.
An alternative that I like, which requires motion controls like the hydra, is having the movement be relative to the controller with the joystick. That way if I am aiming the hydra to the left and push the stick to the right, that equals moving forward. Or if I hold the stick forward I move wherever the controller is pointing. This feels pretty good except when you need to move your hand around a lot while walking. Walking with your fingers will never feel perfect.
I'm a big fan of independent head and torso direction and think it significantly increases situational awareness and immersiveness. The biggest problem is that it requires an additional driftless sensor to track the player heading. The Hydra offers a pretty good solution to this problem.
