‘Step Into Rift’ had been Oculus’ mantra since the launch of the headset back at the end of March, but with the launch of Oculus' dedicated motion controllers, Touch, players can finally ‘Reach Into Rift’ too. Touch has been a long time coming. Oculus has been criticized for launching Rift with a packed in Xbox One controller back in March, while competitor HTC Vive launched just a few days after with a pair of motion tracked controllers in every box. There's no doubt about it, having your hands tracked in VR is not just a more natural way to interact in VR, it's more immersive too. Vive users have known this from the beginning, and now, 8 months later, Rift users will too. [irp posts="45155" name="Oculus Rift Review: Prologue to a New Reality"] As usual, we've got the summary up front with an extensive breakdown following for those who want to dig in. Summary Oculus Touch is (finally) here. There's no denying the controller's beautiful design which also has several smart touches—like a hidden magnet-latching battery cover and easy lanyard removal. The ergonomics are a major step forward, thanks largely to a center of gravity which is much closer to the center of your hand than the Vive controllers. Setup is simple and polished, and with two cameras you can achieve the same 'roomscale' sized playspace that Oculus recommends for a 3-camera setup (though it will be for front-facing experiences only). Additional "experimental" camera configurations allow for a roomscale space that's also 360, or a standing-only 360 experience which feels rather limiting. [gfycat data_id="DefinitiveUnderstatedFennecfox" data_autoplay=true data_controls=false] Tracking performance within the recommended tracking space is extremely good, and we couldn't break tracking no matter how fast we shook the controller. Venturing outside of the recommended playspace leads to quick dropoffs in tracking quality. More than two cameras can be used, but in our experience the extra cameras added occlusion redundancy more so than they managed to increase the size of the recommended 'roomscale' playspace, which is a good deal smaller than that of the Vive. We're also not sure how many developers will opt to target the full roomscale recommended space when they can instead guarantee that all Touch users at least have two cameras for the front-facing setup. 'Hand Presence', which Oculus had drummed up as a sort of differentiator against the Vive controllers, doesn't seem to be a clear cut advantage for Touch. Sure, the controller's ergonomics are great, and much preferred over the Vive's wand design, but both controllers feel equally capable of making you feel like you're using your hands in VR. Adding Touch (and the extra tracking space) to Rift makes VR more natural and immersive. You'll feel like you're reaching into and interacting with of virtual world instead of just looking, as you might have before with just a Rift and a gamepad. With 53 launch titles there's plenty to choose from and while we haven't been able to play through the whole library, there's already a number of early standouts with several exciting titles on the way in 2017. Hardware We used the word "elegant" to describe touch back when we first saw it more than a year and a half ago, and while the controller has changed somewhat, its elegance has remained. Touch is a impressively designed piece of hardware that feels great to hold. Unboxing [gallery type="rectangular" ids="56491,56492,56493,56494,56495,56496,56497,56498"] Inside of every Oculus Touch box you'll find a left and right controller and an additional Oculus Sensor to compliment the one that came with your Rift headset (it should be noted that this Sensor has the same 2.5m cable as the one that comes with the Rift, while the standalone $79 Sensor comes with a 5m extension cable). The box has a white sleeve on it, much like the one that shrouded the Rift's velvety black case. While the Rift case was crazy-nice, you'll find the well constructed cardboard Touch box to be more standard fare. It's nice enough to store and show off your controllers when they aren't in use, and thought it doesn't have a handle, it'll work fine as a carrying case to get the kit to and fro. A tiny box attached to the top of the Touch box's lid houses a mini documentation booklet, AA batteries, and a Rockband VR adapter which can holster Touch to a Rockband guitar; a weird thing to come with every box, especially given that Rockband VR isn't a Touch launch title, but at least you'll have it if you need it. Design & Ergonomics Oculus Touch is a beautiful and—as we'll say again—elegant device. Your hands will feel right at home the moment you grip them. Compared to the Vive controllers, Touch isn't just smaller, it crucially keeps the controller's center of gravity very close to the natural center of gravity of your hands. The result feels much more natural when moving and manipulating the controllers than the wand- or tool-like feel of the Vive controllers. The more compact design also means you can get your virtual hands closer together, which makes them quite a bit less likely to collide with your headset as you swing your arms past; something which can happen often with the Vive when the in-game hand model isn't rendered, with the extra ‘tracking donut’ extending some way beyond your physical hand location. Each controller feels like a solid, integrated unit, and this carries through to the buttons, sticks, and triggers. The face buttons have good travel and seem to have just a hair more resistance than what you might find with an Xbox or PS4 controller, though button presses feel good nonetheless. The menu buttons are much shorter, and almost flush with the face of the controller, making them easy to differentiate from the other buttons even when you can't see the controller. The controller's joysticks feel top notch as well and are surrounded in a rubberized pattern for grip, similar to that of the Xbox One controller. The trigger has an interesting indent that comfortably fits the joint of the last two segments of your index finger. With your thumb up top and index finger on the trigger, your remaining four fingers will find their way around the body of the controller, with your middle finger resting lightly against the 'hand trigger', which is frequently used for grabbing objects (while the index finger trigger tends to be used to activate them). The hand trigger has a very light touch and a good bit of travel, making it easy to press and hold for extended periods. Each Touch controller is powered by a single AA battery, which Oculus says can last for up to 30 hours of gameplay. The battery compartment is smartly hidden as part of the controller's seams. You'll be able to slide the outside grip portion of the controller away to reveal the battery compartment. Rather than a screw or a snap to hold it in place, the cover slots in thanks to a magnet. A nice touch, as it not only removes the need for screwdrivers, but also the risk of breaking or wearing down a plastic tab. Another smart bit of design: rather than having the lanyards attach with a tiny loop that's nigh impossible to remove without tweezers, the lanyard is held in place with a plastic plug that hides inside of the battery compartment. To remove the lanyard, open the battery compartment and remove the plug (but for god's sake, leave it on—you or someone you know will throw the controller, it's only a matter of time). Touch's design is impressive and beautiful throughout, but I can’t quite understand why, in typical Apple fashion, they insisted on making all the parts your fingers touch in glossy black plastic which shows your fingerprints so easily. The face especially—which has one small matte segment that doesn't suffer the same fate—looks pretty the first time you open the box, then it will remain smeared with finger oils for the rest of eternity. Setup Like Rift, Oculus put a ton of time into making a polished setup experience for Touch. Once you plug in your second Sensor, you'll be prompted to configure Touch, which will walk you through Sensor placement, controller syncing, and Guardian (boundary) setup. Setup is pretty simple and it's something you should get used to, as you may want to play with different Sensor configurations to see what suits your space best. The default setup that Oculus recommends consists of two Sensors spaced 3-6 feet apart directly in front of you. You'll probably be tempted to point them inward, but one of the steps will have you adjust them so that they're facing nearly parallel to one another. Having two Sensors, it seems, is less about getting 'stereo' tracking, and more about expanding the available tracking volume. Note: you won't be able to get through Setup with just one Sensor. One of the steps during setup will ask you to pair your controllers. Fortunately, unlike some generic Bluetooth devices you may have used, this is nearly seamless. You'll be prompted to hold the menu and one of the face buttons on one controller until a white LED starts blinking. From here the controller will be found, synced, and get a wireless firmware update if needed. You'll do the same with the other controller before moving on to configure your boundary. Guardian Configuration Using a Touch controller, you'll map out your available playspace. Holding the trigger down while setting the boundary will constantly buzz the controller to let you know that it's still being tracked. If you lose tracking, the buzzing will stop. This, combined with feedback from your monitor (which shows the field of view of each camera), makes it easy to map out all available space while also figuring out how far the tracking boundaries extend. After you trace around the available space, the system will automatically place the largest available rectangle within the bounds, which is where you'll want to define your 'center' in the next step. Based on the size of the rectangle, the setup will tell you if you have a space that's smaller than the Minimum (3 x 3 ft), Moderate (between 3 x 3 and 7 x 5 feet), or Optimal (anything more than 7 x 5 ft). We'll talk more about the performance of this tracking space with the front-facing, 360, and room-scale camera configurations in the Performance section below. Continue Reading on Page 2 >> Performance We know that Oculus' IR LED-based 'Constellation' tracking technology works great for the headset, but how does it translate to motion controllers? When it comes to tracking fidelity, very well it turns out. Within the tracked area, I was essentially unable to move my hands humanly fast enough to get any dropped tracking. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abTo0JpjNyg Oculus recommends three different camera setups, all optimized for different purposes. The first (2-camera Front Facing) is the one you’ll probably see the most often, because most developers are likely to target it. Oculus still considers the other two "experimental". 2-camera Front Facing Oculus expects that for most people it'll be relatively easy for them to place two Sensors on their desk a few feet apart, and that seems to be why they are pushing this as the default recommendation. With two cameras in front, this setup is aimed at front-facing experiences that make use of a roughly 180-degree area in front of you. I was surprised to find that with just two Sensors I was able to completely fill the 'roomscale' space that Oculus recommends when using three cameras. Of course, with both cameras in the front, I won't be able to turn around without losing tracking on the controllers, but it's still a spacious area to move around and it'll give you a lot more breathing room in experiences like Super Hot and Quill than the 360 setup. 2-camera 360 Tracking (configuration guide) In order to facilitate 360 degree tracking, Oculus asks you to move the cameras into the corner of your space, but they don't suggest putting them very far apart. Although you get 360 tracking with this setup, you lose pretty much lose the ability to step in any direction before running into the Guardian boundary. This is only a 5 x 5 square, and I was surprised how small it felt when I traced the boundary right around it. 3-camera 'Roomscale' Tracking (configuration guide) If you want the biggest recommended space of 8.2 x 8.2 ft and 360 (which Oculus calls 'roomscale'), you'll need to pick up a third Sensor ($79 from Oculus) and place it in one of the two rear corners of your space. We showed in the video above that you can hit the same size space with the 2-camera Front Facing, so adding the third camera doesn't seem to be about adding more space, it's just to allow 360 tracking and further prevent occlusion of the controllers. Depending on your PC, you may run into USB bandwidth issues when using the 3-camera setup; Oculus recommends plugging two of the Sensors into USB 3.0 ports and the third Sensor into a USB 2.0 port to try to distribute the throughput across more than one USB bus. Even then, you might find that Oculus Setup isn't thrilled with the capabilities of your USB ports, and you might need to fiddle with plugging your headset and Sensors into different USB ports until you find out what the system can handle. Fortunately, Oculus runs a test every time you plug in a Sensor (during setup) to tell you if everything is good or if one of your Sensors if having tracking issues. 4-camera Tracking Oculus Home supports four Sensors simultaneously, but the company hasn't offered up any specific 4-camera layouts. We didn't specifically test a 4-camera layout, but from our tests of the other setups, it isn't entirely clear that adding a fourth camera means a larger space, it may simply mean a more reliable space. It's likely that more people will run into USB bandwidth issues with four Sensors as well. Pushing the Boundaries Oculus' recommended sizes with each of these setups is pretty much guaranteed to work really well, but for those hoping they can fudge the boundaries, there's not a whole lot of room. The tracking drop off comes quickly once you leave these recommended spaces. The problem seems to be largely with the face-on tracking performance of the controller, which has poor range compared to holding the cutlass edge-on (so that the band is facing the cameras), which allows you go much further before losing tracking. Unfortunately, with the controller's primary orientation being face-on, the edge-on tracking performance is an infrequent best-case scenario. It feels like a missed opportunity; Oculus could have presumably made the cutlass shape a full dome and achieved a much larger practical tracking volume. Hand Presence? Presence (as I often write it with a capital P), is something special and specific; it's different than the colloquial "immersion", it's a deep state of subconscious immersion that is achieved when certain minimum thresholds are met. It's generally agreed that both Rift and Vive headsets can create Presence. Throughout Touch's lengthy pre-launch marketing, Oculus has maintained that the controllers are capable of producing "Hand Presence" which they've occasionally defined as 'the feeling that your virtual hands are your own'. The company has subtly pushed this idea of Hand Presence as a differentiator to the Vive controllers. Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe recently revived the concept in the days leading up to the Touch Launch. At Oculus Connect in October, some of the employees who built Touch claimed that Hand Presence was 'only something that Touch can provide'. When I asked them what Hand Presence was and what specifically they mean when they say that only Touch can provide it, they declined to be more specific. So for Oculus to claim that Touch has Hand Presence, and allude that Vive's controllers do not, means they think Touch passes some threshold that convinces your subconscious that your virtual hands are your own—some threshold that Vive controllers simply don't meet. So does Touch have Hand Presence? Yes. But does only Touch have hand Presence? Well, without a specific definition beyond 'the feeling that your virtual hands are your own', I would say no. In my usage, Vive's controllers are perfectly capable of making you feel like your virtual hands are your own in VR. Touch might be a major step forward in VR controller ergonomics over the current Vive controllers, but is there a significant experiential difference between the two that puts Touch uniquely into a new class of 'Hand Presence controller'? Not really. Touch is an easy choice from a design and ergonomics standpoint, but feels no more usable for VR motion input than Vive's controllers, even if it feels nicer to use in many ways. Finger-sensing Buttons & Gestures Oculus obviously doesn't want to get specific about Hand Presence, but their claim might be about the controller's touch-sensing abilities. The controller isn't called Touch just because it lets you touch virtual worlds, it's also because it can sense where you're touching it. Every input on the controller is capacitive, meaning it knows when you're touching (but not pressing) the A button, for instance, or when you have your finger on the thumbstick. You can also do a few simple gestures like pointing and thumbs up by some combination of press inputs and actual hand movements (a thumbs up, for instance, involves squeezing the hand trigger and then putting your actual thumb up in the air). This allows your virtual hand to match the position of your actual hand on the controller fairly carefully, and while from one static pose to the next it might look convincingly like your hand, there's something snappy and robotic about how the fingers move from one pose to the next in response to your own. You'll often find people looking down at their hands and watching as they move their fingers around to see how the virtual hands react—sort of the opposite of Hand Presence. Eventually you'll stop looking at your hands and start playing games with them. Continue Reading on Page 3 >> Gaming With Touch If you've already got a Rift, adding Touch is going to massively enhance your VR experience. You'll be upgrading from seated, controller-based gameplay to standing or even roomscale experiences where your hands are now part of the game. Using highly tracked motion controllers makes the virtual world more intuitive and more immersive. https://youtu.be/yJWzngJ_DjE The company has said that the reason they didn't release Touch when the Rift first launched is primarily because they were waiting for content to mature. Indeed, the company is launching Touch with an impressive lineup of 53 titles, with a few more high profile games coming later in 2017. 22 of those 53 were games we already saw on SteamVR, leaving 31 brand new titles for the Touch launch. We haven't been able to play everything yet, but we've already found some early standouts. Super Hot VR https://youtu.be/AFH2VaM-QEc This Oculus exclusive uses a unique slow motion mechanic which will make you feel like Neo from The Matrix. In Super Hot, time only moves when you do. If you stand still, everything is frozen. As you begin to move, your enemies do too. The game starts a bit bland, but quickly ratchets up to awesomeness as you're dodging incoming bullets that are whizzing by your head while trying to fire back. The game becomes a fascinating dance of acting and pausing to assess the situation, then acting again. Despite all the action, it almost plays like a puzzle game at times as you figure out just how you should approach each fight scene. You will feel like a bad-ass in no time, and you might try to move in stop and start motions for a few minutes after returning to the real world... Quill https://youtu.be/ekvTAMhI_Y4 Quill, which every Touch owner will get for free, is nothing short of spectacular. I thought initially that there would be a lot of overlap between Oculus Medium and Quill (both art-focused in-house projects from Oculus), but Quill does seem to firmly own its own style—Medium is to clay as Quill is to sketching. Quill also feels like a substantial artist's tool, even more so than Medium, with powerful layer system, brush styles and opacities, exporting, and capturing functionality. Sketching is an extremely accessible medium, and that's recreated in Quill. But just like the same piece of paper and pencil can make a stick figure or a detailed human body, in the right hands, Quill can do amazing things. One of the pre-loaded scenes is jaw-dropping in it's style, skill, and complexity. It might be the first VR art masterpiece. Robo Recall https://youtu.be/AHU2meR4gBQ Robo Recall is another Touch exclusive that will launch for free in 2017. Although we've only had a chance to play a demo version (not available to the public), we absolutely can't wait to get our hands on the full thing. The combination of crisp, UE4 powered graphics with rich visual and audio design makes this game a blast. There's awesome weapons to wield—which feel especially great with Touch's ergonomics—and tons of action to make for yourself amidst the highly interactive enemies. Disclosure: Oculus provided Road to VR with a Touch for review.