Before starting I think a lot of people do not agree on the term "roomscale." I take it at face value; an experience that essentially maps out a whole room. Meaning, a space around 12'x12' average sized room. That is the definition going forward I will go with; Oculus tracks 5'x5' reliably with one sensor, but I am not considering this "roomscale" tracking.
I believe that they chose not to go roomscale because it is not practical in any way, shape or form. Everything from dedicating all or most of a room to VR, the setting up of the sensors, potentially crashing into walls and furniture, still being tethered to a cord, and still having to use a "warping" feature for locomotion all make roomscale the impractical choice.
1. Dedicating a room to VR, I think that argument is obvious. The majority of people thought that the Microsoft Kinect required too much space, and that is just slightly more than Oculus' 5x5, nevermind the 12x12 recommended for "roomscale." If VR is to gain mainstream popularity, thinking that the mainstream is going to dedicate a room to VR is a bit naïve IMO.
2. Setting up of the sensors - "roomscale" requires sensor be placed in the back of the room. That sensor will require either a power cord, USB cord, or both. Again, the mainstream does not want to be mounting stuff to their walls and have cables hanging down just for a VR experience. The Oculus approach of two sensors on the front of your desk (or alongside your flatscreen TV) is much, much more practical.
3. What good is "roomscale" when the experience you are in is larger than the size of your room? At some point you will run into room boundaries and at that point the immersion is broken. Putting aside immersion, there is also the safety factor of wandering around a room essentially blindfolded. Even digital aides in VR are not going to catch everything and it could result in some broken items and accidents.
4. In the same vein, being tethered to a cord that you can easy get tangled around and trip on further exacerbates the limitations of "roomscale". Without 100% wireless HMD "roomscale" is much less attractive.
5. You can only walk so far before you hit the boundaries of your room. And then you have to warp in game. This is a bizarre concept to me because it breaks immersion, the opposite of what VR is supposed to do.
In my opinion, a competing HMD used "roomscale" as a big marketing push because it is a way it differentiated itself from the rift and justified its very inconvenient sensor setup. Without being able to compete on size, weight, comfort, price, and likely motion controllers either once the oculus touch is released - the company that made that HMD used a great marketing strategy to make it seem like this was a must-have feature, while in reality I haven't seen a single implementation that works well for anything beyond a tech demo (IMO).
Personally, I hope Oculus sticks to their guns with the two front-placed sensors. I don't want to be mounting stuff to the back of my room, and I don't want to be warping around every minute after reaching my room boundaries. Oculus gives a large enough zone for VR tracked motion without requiring a whole room or impractical setup.
You have said that room-scale fits your martial arts lifestyle better even though you don't have room-scale in your home in order to test out the theory. I call it fictitious because it isn't really happening. You are also claiming that things people are saying about room-scale don't make sense to you, someone who doesn't own a room-scale device. If you are not speaking from first-hand experience then you are theorizing, which is the same thing as "pretending," which makes it fictitious.
Wait a minute......hold on......The vive hating Zenbane saying that if you don't own a device anything you say about it is pretending?! HES BEEN PRETENDING THIS ENTIRE TIME!
Which room-scale game are you playing with your Rift in a way that fits your martial arts life-style, Mr.Creepy? 😮
Your putting words in my mouth now. Man, i gotta give it to you Zenbane, you have a truly obnoxious attitude :lol: I'm impressed by your ability to be so annoying.
Okay a serious question: are you going to order a Vive, are do you plan to wait for the Rift's constellation-based room-scale update? If you said this already I apologize for missing it.
I'm gonna wait for Touch, i can barely afford games, buying another VR headset might be a bit of a stretch. I am happy with my Rift, i just want tracked controllers.
Nice screenshots, ziph, but in case you didn't know... games like Chronos and Edge of Nowhere are not available on Steam (yet). I do think it's cool that a roomscale game is selling so well on that one single room-scale medium. Kinda like being the smartest kid in Special Ed. Bravo.
This is very similar to your poll/survey thread. You really like fake math.
I think you might have misunderstood the screenshot? My point was that this roomscale VR game managed to get to the #1 top seller across all platforms on steam. It was not top seller among VR games, it was top seller among all games available on steam. I find that pretty impressive considering how small a market VR gaming still is.
As someone with a degree in mathematics, i would very much like to know what the definition of "fake math" is btw?
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Nice screenshots, ziph, but in case you didn't know... games like Chronos and Edge of Nowhere are not available on Steam (yet). I do think it's cool that a roomscale game is selling so well on that one single room-scale medium. Kinda like being the smartest kid in Special Ed. Bravo.
This is very similar to your poll/survey thread. You really like fake math.
I think you might have misunderstood the screenshot? My point was that this roomscale VR game managed to get to the #1 top seller across all platforms on steam. It was not top seller among VR games, it was top seller among all games available on steam. I find that pretty impressive considering how small a market VR gaming still is.
As someone with a degree in mathematics, i would very much like to know what the definition of "fake math" is btw?
Oculus update indicates upto 4 camera sensor support. It clearly is for the 4 corners of a room scale vr setup.
room scale has already been proven to work fine with 2. Check out 'Reality Check VR' on youtube. Almost seems like the update was just to make it future proof.
