In readiness for the imminent launch of Oculus’ ‘Touch’ motion controllers, the company have rolled out the new ‘Guardian’ feature, their version of SteamVR’s Chaperone VR boundary system for room-scale VR. The update also brings anti-judder tech Asynchronous Spacewarp and a new user reviews system.

Oculus have been repeating the familiar mantra “seated VR experience” for quite some time now, a reflection of the company’s launch focus for gaming, perhaps a cautious approach to setting user expectations for safety, but most of all an acknowledgement of the company’s lack of dedicated motion controllers. As such, the company hasn’t had to worry too much about people throwing themselves into walls during frantic room-scale VR gameplay sessions and therefore, no need for an equivalent to SteamVR’s excellent ‘Chaperone’ system.

Valve's 'Chaperone' system displays a virtual wall inside the headset | Photo courtesy Valve
Valve’s ‘Chaperone’ system displays a virtual wall inside the headset | Photo courtesy Valve

As of next month however that all changes. Although the company is still coy about selling the Oculus Rift as a room-scale VR system, the new ‘Guardian’ feature which is rolling out to Oculus Home users gradually worldwide, is a recognition that once the Oculus Touch motion controllers ship in December, that all changed – even if the company’s messaging is still all about “seated and standing” games for now.

SEE ALSO
Oculus Touch Will Support 360 and Room-scale Tracking With Extra Cameras

Valve’s Chaperone system, which was unveiled along with the HTC Vive at GDC in 2015, presents a hologram-style virtual wall overlaid onto your VR experience warning you when either the tracked headset or SteamVR controllers come close to colliding with a real-world wall – as defined by your room’s setup in Steam. Recently, Oculus confirmed that Guardian would be included in their SDK 1.8 update for developers to begin the feature’s inclusion.

The jury is still out on Oculus’ outside-in ‘constellation’ tracking system and its suitability, viability or prowess tracking in VR at room-scale, however the Touch ships with an additional camera to mitigate against controller occlusion and you’re able to add more, should you want tracking angles to cover your room-scale play area. There are users out there with early access to Oculus Touch who have done just this and report good things, but it’s clear that running a USB cabled camera to inaccessible parts of your VR playspace may not be quite as elegant as SteamVR’s inside-out laser-based Lighthouse system.

SEE ALSO
Developer Pushes Valve's Lighthouse Tracking to its Limits

Asynchronous Spacewarp

Although Oculus’ latest initative to smooth out the VR experience has been present since the prior 1.9 release of Oculus’ runtime, 1.10 marks the official banner release of Asynchronous Spacewarp. A significant evolution of Oculus’ Asynchronous Timewarp, ASW extends the anti-judder technology from just rotational head tracking to translation tracking too. As we recently reported, the feature was unveiled by Oculus’ CEO Brendan Iribe at the company’s annual developer conference ‘Connect’ who stated that the new feature could reduce the hardware costs for a VR capable PC significantly.

spacewarp-oculus

Asynchronous spacewarp is Oculus’s new solution to fix judder caused by positional movement in the playspace. As explained by Iribe, spacewarp takes the app’s two previous frames and analyzes the difference, and then calculates that difference to extrapolate and generate a new synthetic frame. This helps smooth moving objects, even the entire scene, so when you’re moving your hands or body, you won’t have judder or ghosting images. In short, it does this by halving the app’s framerate to 45 fps when it hits a snag and sandwiches in a synthetically generated frame to return it to 90.

User Reviews

For better or for worse, everyone feels their opinion is valid on the internet and what people say about products they’ve spent money on has become an ever stronger component of platforms and portals selling those products to us. The user review feedback system which has been present in Valve’s Steam platform for some time, has become increasingly important to gamers in guiding their purchasing decisions. And now, Oculus has added similar functionality to its content portal ‘Home’. Below screenshots courtesy of the folks over at /r/oculus.

The simple review system allows those who have purchased games or applications through Oculus Home to write a review of their experiences and apply a rating out of five as a quick indicator of their satisfaction. Those star ratings are then tallied up and presented at the bottom of the game’s store presence.

Personally, I do generally find this kind of user feedback useful, but such systems can be wide open abuse should moderation not be good enough. Just recently for example, Valve amended the way review scores are aggregated, removing those scores given for users who obtained the title via a Steam key. The thinking being that a developer can theoretically dole out review keys to anyone they like and therefore, the opportunity to do so in return for positive reviews was a problem. According to a report from Eurogamer, Valve thinks that some 160 titles may have artificially inflated review scores as a result of abuse of this system.

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Paul James
Based in the UK, Paul has been immersed in interactive entertainment for the best part of 27 years and has followed advances in gaming with a passionate fervour. His obsession with graphical fidelity over the years has had him branded a ‘graphics whore’ (which he views as the highest compliment) more than once and he holds a particular candle for the dream of the ultimate immersive gaming experience. Having followed and been disappointed by the original VR explosion of the 90s, he then founded RiftVR.com to follow the new and exciting prospect of the rebirth of VR in products like the Oculus Rift. Paul joined forces with Ben to help build the new Road to VR in preparation for what he sees as VR’s coming of age over the next few years.
  • Get Schwifty!

    Okay, I will start the ball rolling on this…

    “Oculus have been repeating the familiar mantra “seated VR experience” for quite some time now, a reflection of the company’s launch focus for gaming, perhaps a cautious approach to setting user expectations for safety, but most of all an acknowledgement of the company’s lack of dedicated motion controllers. As such, the company hasn’t had to worry too much about people throwing themselves into walls during frantic room-scale VR gameplay sessions and therefore, no need for an equivalent to SteamVR’s excellent ‘Chaperone’ system.”

    Bit of spin here in my opinion; Oculus has acknowledged long ago that room scale was possible with their system, and emphasized seated/standing 180′ experiences first because they believe (and may still be very well correct for the majority of buyers beyond early adopters, at least for the next few years) that they will be content with this and later if they become strong enough enthusiasts to desire room scale and make room for it. To say that they emphasized seated VR to make up for a lack of dedicated motion controllers is not quite true; they acknowledge they could have released Touch with the CV1 release but it held it back to refine it slightly, but more importantly to give developers time to produce a body of software to help solidify the appearance of a platform that is well-rounded and introduce it all together. Where I will agree is that the early-adopter crowing about room-scale (never mind that most of the games still aren’t) did push Oculus to get more serious about it sooner than I think they had planned originally.

    Then there is this statement:

    “The jury is still out on Oculus’ outside-in ‘constellation’ tracking system and its suitability, viability or prowess tracking in VR at room-scale, however the Touch ships with an additional camera to mitigate against controller occlusion and you’re able to add more, should you want tracking angles to cover your room-scale play area.”

    I guess the jury in the court of public opinion perhaps, but everyone who has experienced it reports it works pretty well, and it would be a dangerous feature if it didn’t work well, and given how concerned Oculus is about users getting sick, etc. I would expect if anything the system might be calibrated a little more towards safety than is really necessary.

    One point left out in this review is the detail that the Guardian feature is designed according to reports to support a barrier display that fits in more or less with the theme of the game so devs can tailor it to create a less jarring reminder of the edge of the play area; think of a wooden fence being displayed in a Western town, or a barbed wire fence in an urban area for instance.

    • It’s almost impossible to write factually about these divisive subjects without someone taking issue I’ve noticed recently.

      I’ve been speaking and meeting with Oculus since 2012, and I can tell you that their position didn’t alter on room-scale (even before such a term had even really been coined) until Touch was publicly demo’d at E3 last year. And even then, they were coy.

      Only recently have the company been more forthcoming about these capabilities and of course since some users have received touch units, those capabilities are beginning to emerge. Even if privately and in interviews where allusions were made to room-scale, the company position was (and largely still is) that their focus is seated and standing gameplay. I included notes as to those recent user experiences deliverately to point out that room scale for Oculus is looking eminently possible, but until that hardware is in play in the public space, no one has any real idea how well it will work for many people. Chances are it’ll be fine, but right now we just don’t know.

      And I didn’t say they de-emphasised room-scale just because of their lack of motion controller support, but it absolutely was a factor. They were focused on gamepad games, hence the included Xbox controller, and that remained so until Touch really began emerging.

      As for details of Guardian, this piece was merely to state this was coming and the comparisons with SteamVR Chaperone in general, there wasn’t room for a deeper discussion. And again, we haven’t seen the system in action much if at all so until we have those comments are best left out for now.

      • DiGiCT Ltd

        Indeed, tests need to be done with it independently and over more as just a few apps, as the movement and behaviours are different in all of them, some might track fine and some might not, or all works fien is something we need to see later on.
        From sony we already know their tracking does not work always good.
        Just wait , test and see is all we can do.

      • Get Schwifty!

        I appreciate your response, I think there are two basic issues in the way the question is discussed.

        It’s great that you have talked with Oculus since 2012, but you should include that kind of observation for your reports, otherwise they come across as a bit biased and readers don’t know the full context you speak of. That lack of context affects how people will interpret the inevitable biases of the reporting.

        The other is the language used; to imply that Constellation is in serious question is simply heavy-handed. The system works today with even one camera reasonably well for limited “rug scale” as Ben likes to put it. If we are just talking broad public test, you could argue we don’t fully know, but we are getting reports from devs (complete with detailed video) that show it works very well and reliably, not to mention the R2VR folks who have had hands on with Touch under similar circumstances. Contrast that with the initial reports of folks using PSVR where people almost routinely reported that tracking was sub-par to either Oculus or Vive.

        I realize the articles are written on R2VR by different authors, but contrast this coverage of a fairly important item for Rift vs. that of the wireless add-on for Vive; the questions surrounding it, which are pretty significant, gets only a nod and a much more optimistic tone over all, whereas here we are discussing a more or less known quantity but still speaking as if it is in some serious doubt which is rubbish. Again, I appreciate your response, I hope you understand why given all the evidence we have that one could easily read your statements in a light different than that which you probably intended.

        On a different note, what is your expectation about the introduction time of asynchronous spacewarp? Should we expect only later titles in 2017 to support it, or will it be “patched in” to existing games?

        • There’s nothing I reported above that was either based on opinion of conjecture. For some reason you’ve decided to cherry pick certain aspects of a reasonable balanced set of points – all based on fact – to assert that somehow I was being wreckless in the way I presented the situation.

          Let’s break the paragraph in question down:

          “The jury is still out on Oculus’ outside-in ‘constellation’ tracking system and its suitability, viability or prowess tracking in VR at room-scale…”

          This is true. Room-scale or rug-scale VR has been experienced by the press (and users) for the most part under controlled, ideal conditions. Users don’t have their hands on Touch yet and therefore the vast array of variable playspace sizes and shapes (that make up the generic term ‘room-scale’) have not and will not be tested until Touch’s release. This is fact. And even if you were to take an overly negative impression from that, in the very same sentence I include the following balancing caveat:

          “…however the Touch ships with an additional camera to
          mitigate against controller occlusion and you’re able to add more, should you want tracking angles to cover your room-scale play area. There are users out there with early access to Oculus Touch who have done just this and report good things…”

          …to say that from what we can see and have seen things are lookig mighty positive.

          Finally, I include an important distinction with room-scale via
          Constellation that’s important:

          “…but it’s clear that running a USB cabled camera to inaccessible parts of your VR playspace may not be quite as elegant as SteamVR’s inside-out laser-based Lighthouse system.”

          Which again is factually based. It likely will be less convenient to run long USB cables back to your PC depending on your room size and shape. The only thing I possibly should have added here is the follow up counterpoint that Lighthouse requires power socket close to any base stations required (I may add this in after I’ve finished here actually). But if we wrote every news article including every counterpoint they’d
          end up being interminable.

          As I say, it feels as if you’ve read negative (or indeed pessimistic) bias here where none exists. Is it cautious? Yes, with good reason – we haven’t yet had enough time to verify either way yet.

          We do try our hardest to ensure our articles are balanced, but at the same time it’s not realistic for us to vet every article to make sure inferences will upset people. We’d never publish anything if we did that.

          RE ASW adoption, it’s an excellent question. In short I don’t yet know, but my gut tells me patching for the latest SDK and runtime seems inevitable in short order. I’ve not spoken to developers to gauge is this is an essentially ‘free’ benefit with no extra integral coding required. I’ll see if we can’t find out.

          Lastly, we always appreciate constructuve feedback, especially when it’s presented as clearly as you have. Keep it up and we’ll bear the feedback in mind as we go forward.

          • DougP

            Re: “It likely will be less convenient to run long USB cables back to your PC depending on your room size and shape”

            My “VR room” is 5m x 4m (~15′ x 12′). As well, I’m certain for solid coverage I’d require at least 3x cameras, possibly (preferably?) 4x cameras.
            So other disadvantages & things to consider:
            1) Expensive lengthy USB 3.0 cables
            2) Running out of USB 3.0 interfaces on the PC!
            Seriously #2 here – that’s a real concern.

            I already have multiple devices hooked-up to USB 3.0.
            I’m not certain how many USB 3.0 ports your average computer has/uses, nor the typical # of devices people already use on these ports, but that’s going to be a concern for a lot of people.

            I also wonder if we’re going to see issues with:
            1) USB bandwidth issues – processing that many high-speed video streams, probably across multiple controllers (i.e. add-on cards to add ports)
            2) In the scenario of 4x cameras – additional burden on PC processing all of those streams

            If anything, I think that you’ve gone rather *light* on how inelegant a solution Oculus has gone with, for setting up large room-scale configurations, compared to Lighthouse power & forget (& processing of position within the device itself – no bandwidth/burden on PC CPU/ports).

          • With respect 1) isn’t another disadvantage, it’s the same one I mentioned. 2) Is possible but frankly simple to fix with an additional card (and any motherboard chipset from the last 2 years has an abundance of USB3 headers anyway). And I didn’t say Constellation was inelegant, it’s arguably far more elegant for seated VR when coupled with rear LEDs. Is it less elegant for room-scale? Probably. But Constellation overall is still a fine tracking system for VR.

            As for the rest of your points, again this wasn’t a deep dive on constellation but yes they are all factors that and once again, we’ll know more about once users have the systems hooked up and in use.

          • DougP

            Re: “Is it less elegant for room-scale? Probably.”
            Have upwards of 4x 15-20 foot+ USB cables (extensions?) running across walls & ceilings is incredibly inelegant (my word, not yours).

            Re: “any motherboard chipset from the last 2 years has an abundance of USB3 headers anyway”
            I’ve a 10-month old top tier, one of the more expensive, ASUS x99 Pro motherboards & I would be hard pressed to have enough USB 3.0 ports free to setup this configuration.
            You do realize that many/most of us PC gaming/VR enthusiasts will already be using multiple USB 3.0 ports for peripherals.

            With a 4x camera setup (for my VR room) – we’re talking what, a total of 7x (SEVEN) USB 3.0 ports – FREE (available)!
            I call BS on that assumption – that a majority of people will have this many USB 3.0 ports empty.

            Re: “simple to fix with an additional card”
            You’re also minimizing this topic. Simple fix – 1st, a lot of people have pre-built / *canned* PCs & either don’t want or aren’t very capable of installation extra cards.
            Or…on the other end of the spectrum, like myself, you’ve got a top-tier setup that’s already very crowded on the PCI bus – not having room or worry about airflow next to GPU or SLI/crossfire setup (again airflow)… or in my case I already went for i7-5930 chip for the extra PC lanes I needed to support SLI & my M.2 onboard SSD boot/OS drive takes up the rest.
            So that “additional card” is problematic for both the “I bought the PC pre-built & don’t own a screwdriver (nor understand how to install/debug drivers)” & the “I’ve already stuff & maximized my liquid cooled monster” crowd.

            I think you are far underestimating the 7x USB 3.0 port requirement / hassle.
            Not to mention the duct-tape required to strap those 4x cables to my ceiling/walls.

            It will be interesting to see how it performs in 3x-4x camera configurations (what I’m expecting to require for my setup for the room size & coverage). I hope that it’s not problematic with video streams/bandwidth.

          • Michael Davidson

            I would like to point out the laptop crowd on the USB 3.0 subject. I have begun using an Alienware 15 R3 for my VR experiences and I am hard pressed for USB 3 ports. I have already bought 1 Type C to USB 3 converter and will more than likely buy another. In the end I will have to figure out if I will be able to hook all this up successfully to a USB 3 powered hub. I would like to point out, without trying to be argumentative, that I don’t have a USB issue with the Vive.

          • Get Schwifty!

            Someone else (I forget now where I read it) got this working with a USB Hub. People are forgetting these, not sure why, but they will work for many folks and Oculus fully expects people to employ them. The Inateck card they recommend is a trusted and tried solution, but there are others that work as well for full PC’s. As a fellow Alienware laptop user, I am grappling with that same question (though I will need to step up to the current gen to do VR on), and that is when I tripped across a discussion with a guy who got a hub working. If I can find it I will post the link here…

            EDIT: It’s late when I am writing this, then I remembered, it’s Alienware’s intention you use the Graphics Amplifier in many cases which adds 4 3.0 USB ports on top of what the laptop has. I guess they expect you to use only the HMD and one camera and a game controller on the go and use the Amplifier to add the other ports when you do VR at your stationary position.

          • Get Schwifty!

            In the short term Lighthouse is easier to deploy, no question. The problem it has is down the road it’s utterly unable to do anything to bring the user ultimately into the picture so to speak in VR, it’s just positional tracking. Hence the need later on (3-5 years) to stick cheap little lighthouse chips on any and everything… There’s a reason Oculus went with the camera tech; in time it will effectively “see” you, possibly even incorporate your entire or parts of your surroundings, and project it into a VR space. In time it might even do away with the need for controllers altogether. In the short term, it means we have cables, but if they really bother you, get some USB wireless extenders for the extra 3rd and 4th cameras. I’ll be bold here and predict that I for one believe Lighthouse is an interim (albeit convenient and effective) solution for tracking, and in time HTC will move towards camera tech for the benefits it will bring.

            There is no evidence I know of as yet of any measurements showing a concern for USB bandwidth or CPU load for 4 cameras, two is negligible, at this stage to it doesn’t appear 4 will be any serious issue. If you know of a link discussing load measurements I would love see it personally, but watching just my PC with one camera currently and CPU processing, it’s next to nothing for load even turning around, etc.

    • Nein

      That would be the marketing team at Oculus doing the spin not RoadToVR.

      • Get Schwifty!

        Thank you for the insightful and intelligent comment *rolls eyes*

        • Nein

          It’s alright to be wrong once in a while.

  • ipgara@blueyonder.co.uk

    I am very happy with my rift. I have the touch controllers and an extra camera pre-ordered :) I have tried both the Vive and Rift, I prefer the rift.

  • Ned Hoon

    I can already walk around with the Rift HMD with a single sensor without any issue in a 3m X 3.5m space so I cant see any problems when I have a 3 sensor setup with Touch covering the same area.As for cabling to the sensors its no different than running a power extension for the Vive lighthouse.

    • Get Schwifty!

      I know, it’s such an overstated point. It’s as if all the current home data with just even ONE sensor is not enough, plus we have videos in regular environments doing “room scale” with two cameras and yet we are questioning the use of three? What you are pointing out is exactly my point, that the camera tracking isn’t that unknown a quantity in the real world…. and yet the rampant skepticism is there and in reporting on it, I just don’t get it given all the current evidence.

      In about a month we will know how well all this works with Touch, and I think this skepticism will die out fairly quick… no question that Rift doesn’t have the camera tracking issues that PSVR has, not even in the same ballpark, it’s more like a slight less accurate (meaning negligible difference) to Lighthouse. There will be folks with some USB issues, and some folks will have some tracking problems (just like Vive), but the majority will work very well.

    • JustNiz

      > As for cabling to the sensors its no different than running a power extension for the Vive lighthouse.

      Its totally different. Vive lighthouses just plug into any power socket and have no connection to the PC, which means your play area remains totally free of cables. With Oculus You need mutliple long USB cables (1 per sensor) going to your PC, meaning at least 2 from right across the room, probably right through your play area. Occulus roomscale needs 3 more USB ports on your PC than Vive which could be a real problem for people that don’t have many to start with, or have several other USB devices already plugged in. For instance I already have a keyboard, mouse, monitor, printer, joystick, hotas throttle and bluetooth adapter and a Vive all using USB. To use an oculus I’d have to add a USB bridge which means more money/cabling and added latency.