Oculus Tracker Update 1.12 makes Oculus a good guy again

After having criticized Oculus about its tracking issues and how its updates were making things even worse (unless you used Duct Tape, of course… duct tape fixes everything!), today I have to say “Bravo!” to its guys.

The new Update they’ve released for the Rift, the 1.12, seems to have fixed lots of stuff: as you can see from the release notes, a lot of work has been done to make tracking good again. The feedbacks from the users have been really positive and now reddit shows people writing “With 1.12 my room scale works” and so the virtual world is a happier place. Surely there will be people that will still experience errors and problems, but their number has been drastically lowered.

Oculus tracker problems can be fixed using duct tape?

We all know the problems that Oculus is having with its room-scale tracking and the fact that its just released update (the 1.11) is not helping that much. Nate Mitchell has tried saying that everything is ok and that bad tracking is all fault of bad camera positioning by the users but I don’t believe this that much.

Today I opened a post that was lying around on reddit (ah, the lovely reddit) since some days ago, to discover an absolutely strange but effective solution to these problems.

Oculus Releases Tracker Update 1.11 but with no luck

After reading about all room-scale problems, Oculus had announced an update of its tracking system for the end of January. It arrived a bit later, but it arrived, with a long list of improvements, starting from the Oculus Home carpet being straightened (wtf, seriously).

If you’re thinking about this has solved all problems… well, you’re wrong. Subreddit /r/oculus is again a long list of “my room-scale setup doesn’t work”. Someone has posted images of his glitches seen in Quill…

a few rift tracking errors i captured with quill (using 1.11)

Oculus Touch tracking problems… it’s all USB fault? And will they be fixed?

Since their announcement, Oculus Touch have gathered lots of attentions and positive reviews. I’ve tried them and reviewed them (here and here, and even talked about their SDK here) and I agree that they’re great.

But lots of users are having lots of issues: unstable tracking, room scale not working and so on. It seems that Oculus answer to Vive room-scale has not been that good. I and lots of other users have not had any issues, but on reddit every day tons of users say that they’re having problems: Touch drifting, losing tracking… this kind of stuff.

Google Earth VR review (and how to make it work with Oculus)

Do you remember my article about Google Earth VR? It was about Google project of porting Google Earth to VR: an application you can already play for free on Steam and that has generated a lot of hype. At last, today I’ve managed to give it a try and so I can write you a little review.

First of all we all thought that Google made Google Earth only for Vive because at that time Oculus had not ergonomic controllers. But now Oculus has awesome controllers, the Touch, so finally Google Earth VR can work with Ocu…no, forget it: it continues working with Vive only. So, how is it possible that I tried it with my Rift and Touch? Well, there is a hack that I found thanks to RoadToVR and the name of this hack is FakeVive. FakeVive is basically a DLL that tricks the programs saying to it that the current headset is a Vive: it may actually be a Oculus Rift, Razer HDK or a potato, the program will think that it is a HTC Vive. The repository of FakeVive already has all instructions to use it to play with Google Earth VR, so all you have to do is go there and follow each step. Basically you get this DLL and put it on Google Earth executable directory and that’s it! You can finally play Google Earth with Oculus and Touch!

Getting started with Oculus Touch and Avatar SDK in Unity

Welcome to 2017! I wish to you all that this will be an astonishing year!

In 2016 I left you with this video showcasing my first experiments with Oculus Touch, Avatar SDK, in cooperation with our ImmotionRoom full body system. As you can see in the video, there are female full body avatars made with ImmotionRoom (so, basically, made using a Microsoft Kinect) and epic-bearded blue avatars made using Oculus Avatar SDK. Then there is some firing, because firing in VR is always cool!

This demo took me more time than expected, due to some problems I had in using the Avatar SDK. That’s why I’m writing this article: to help you in developing using this SDK wasting less time than me. It will not be a step-by-step tutorial, but I’ll give you some detailed hints. So, ready… go!

First experiments with Oculus Touch!

Today I’ve made first experiments with Oculus Touch and their companion SDK! It’s been super-interesting and I’ve learnt really a lot! I’ve also had some fun, but I found that there are some obscure things that I had to learn with trials&errors… so in the new year I’ll make a tutorial just for you my dear readers!

In the meantime, enjoy this video showcasing the results of my experiments!

Oculus Touch: first review

Some days ago, finally my Oculus Touch that I preordered some months ago have arrived… but I haven’t been able to try it thoroughly until today, when I played 2 hours with them. I’ll write here a short review about them and then I’ll write a more detailed one on our Immotionar website in the next days.

I’ll drop the bomb immediately: I did not fall in love with Oculus Touch. Now I’ll give fanboys the time to go at the end of this article and write bad comments about me saying that they want to kill me… have you done it? Ok, now I can go on happily :). Let me explain what I mean… I like both Oculus and Vive, so it is not a matter of brand…

Palmer Luckey, don’t get angry… but I don’t think that your controllers are super-awesome

HTC Vive shows new controllers and wireless version

We were all expecting it: after all the hype generated by Oculus technologies at Oculus Connect 3, HTC and Steam had to react somehow.

We didn’t have to wait that much: at Steam Dev Days, Steam has announced great news: a new base station system for Vive and a new type of VR controllers!