Q: Do you feel that the "most compelling experience" aspect will be pretty similar between Rift and Vive once the Touch controllers launch and people have multiple sensors?
A: Absolutely. If I look purely at the comfort and quality of the headsets alone I would give it to the Rift but the ability to reach out and "touch" the virtual world is what makes the Vive so magical for me.
Q: You say they each have their strengths and weaknesses, what do you think is the Rifts weak point, or what if anything don't you like about it?
A: I don't like having to wait for tracked controllers. If I would buy a headset for myself right now it would probably be the Vive because it's a complete VR package for what I want to do in VR while the Rift is a slightly superior, much more ergonomic headset but is also making me wait for touch for half a year.
Q: just dump things you dont see get posted or talked about often.
crippling issues would be nice to know about.
also business dealings and contracts etc
A: No chat / messaging abilities at all on the Oculus software. Makes a friendlist a bit pointless IMO but maybe that's about to change soon. There's a bit of pressure to use OpenVR for multiple headsets instead of seperate builds but we try to be as platform agnostic as possible.
info: Since /u/GrabASock wanted to know what changed in recent SDK updates: When I said they stopped giving out changelogs for SDK updates I was just looking at updates to the Unity integration. I just found an archive of changelogs containing all changes from 0.2.5 to 1.0.0 and will update this post with the most important changes and when they happened.
EDIT: Someone asked when Asynchronous timewarp was added. It's 0.9 1.0.0 added the Lighthouse-style floor level coordinate system, DX12 support and introduced backwards and forwards compatibility for SDK 0.6 - 1.0 games on all future runtime versions. Everything after 1.0.0 is purely minor additions and bugfixes.
Q: 1.0.0 added the Lighthouse-style floor level coordinate system, DX12 support and introduced backwards and forwards compatibility for SDK 0.6 - 1.0 games on all future runtime versions. Do you know how to enable that backwars compatibility? I'm not a dev, but I have the Oculus Home beta and a DK2. Since the last update (1.2 I believe), the support for SDK 0.8 apps was gone..
A:The latest one is 1.3 Beta. They pushed that a few days ago. You can check the version you're running under "gear icon" -> Settings -> General If you're in the LIVE channel you should always be on the most recent version. I'm not sure if it's something you have to enable and if it's even there anymore but it's in the changelog for 1.0.0
Q: have you tried a 0.6 - 0.7 compiled games yourself? The dev for flyinside seems to think 0.7 doesn't work https://www.reddit.com/r/oculus/comments/4asq6z/are_games_made_for_sdk_8_compatible_with_10/d139ajb
A: I'll download something compiled against 0.7 and will edit this post with my result. Edit: It looks like that feature got removed from one of the later releases. 1.3B doesn't work at all with 0.6 or 0.7 software and 1.0 only works with some. It seems random which work and which don't, even on the same
Q: Does the DX12 support make a big difference? I'm still on Win7 and have a GTX 970, I'm wondering if upgrading to 10 would improve the performance at all.
A: You should see a slight performance boost with games running on DX12 but Rift games are made to reach 90fps on a 970 anyway.
Q: What about AMD? Lots of horror stories going around about AMD cards and Vive. Am I in trouble with my new R9 390? Pre-ordered Rift btw.
A: We use a 970 in every single of our systems for development and testing to force ourselves to optimize for the recommended specs. Wide testing across multiple different GPUs is usually only done in the last few weeks leading up to a release candidate and almost never in-house. With 10k+ Vive Pre owners out there I'm sure we would have heard a lot more complaints if there were widespread issues with AMD.
Q: Can the Oculus Rift support room scale if you really want to make it work?
A: So we have two VR rooms in this building. One for our office and one for a second team working on something else. My team doesn't work with motion controllers. Take everything I say about the Vive controllers and Touch with a grain of salt since I don't use them daily. When we set up the VR room downstairs specifically for roomscale we did some measurements of the tracker's range and field of view and came to the conclusion that both have pretty much the same fov but the lighthouse stations have a slightly higher usable range which is by the way bigger than what they recommend as the largest play area.
Q: Do you find that the sensor range on the ES08 (Engineering Sample 08) is high enough to allow you to be tracked to the full headset cable length away from it?
A: That's about 5 meters. Our VR room is slightly less than 4.5 across and I didn't have any issues there.
Q: Do you know which controllers your colleagues prefer between the Touch and Vive (the ones in the other team)? What is their general impressions?
A: From what I've heard they prefer Touch for the implications of finger tracking, the analogue grips and because they're shaped like a neutral hand pose.
Q: Rift's and Touch's roomscales capabilities and limits you've experienced?
A: Lighthouse is a bit picky with reflective surfaces and strong direct light. Other than that no issues.
Q: People have used vive outside in direct sunlight and in rooms with mirrored walls. These haven't been problems for a while. You said you have a vive cv?
A: The headset is a Pre which they assured us is identical to the production model hardware wise. The controllers we use are engineering samples.
Q: Then it does work in sunlight and mirrors are not a problem.
A: They assured us the ES controllers and Pre headset are production hardware. The Pre controllers were not which is why they updated us with newer models.
Info: These are pictures of the rift's interface and the current health and safety screen. I took them a while ago but they didn't change anything visually since then. http://puu.sh/nMnWF/10854fbc32.jpg
Q: Please tell me that the fire doesn't actually look like giant floating yellow squares.
A: It's fully animated and the aesthetic is intentional.
Q: Does the SDE actually look this improved, or is the camera not quite capturing all the gritty detail? I want to believe it looks this good, but something tells me the camera had something to do with it.
A: A bit of both. It's really hard to actually see the screendoor and if you're not trying the hardest to stare at it it does look like a continuous surface but the camera is certainly smoothing things.
Q: That sort of red/green ghosting seen... it looks similar to red/green 3D pictures/video. Is that how it looks in game when you're wearing the headset? Because I see the same thing using Google cardboard, and it's so very distracting.
A: Nope. It's just a result of the awkward camera angle while I was pressing my phone against the Rift. The Rift SDK actually draws its own ghosting to cancel out the ghosting you would normally get from lense
