Category: nate mitchell

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Oculus Expands QA Testing For Rift 1.12 Patch, Proposes Early Preview Program

Oculus Expands QA Testing For Rift 1.12 Patch, Proposes Early Preview Program

After a small delay, Oculus’ much anticipated Rift update hit earlier this month, though for some it brought more issues than fixes. The company is looking to change that very soon, and this time without any other unforeseen problems.

Nate Mitchell of Oculus’ PC VR team recently took to the Oculus forums to give a brief update on the status of the next release, 1.12. He stated that the company’s current priority was to fix these new bugs, which many have cited as height tracking issues, “without reducing the impact of 1.11’s tracking quality improvements.”

The issues have mainly been ascribed to setups that use three or more sensors for room scale VR.

Oculus is still looking to release the update this month, but isn’t prepared to give a final date yet. “That’s because 1.12 is going through an expanded QA and testing process to make sure we haven’t overlooked any new issues,” Mitchell said. “As soon as it’s ready, we’ll ship it.”

Hopefully expanded QA will prevent any further issues with future updates, although Mitchell also revealed Oculus is considering an “early preview program” in which Rift owners would be able to test official updates before they fully launched, a little like how Sony offers beta testing for its system firmware updates on PlayStation 4. “This is something we’ve wanted to do for awhile, but has been on the back-burner behind other features,” Mitchell explained. “Hopefully, this should help us gather more community feedback and testing to help catch issues like this in the future.”

An update on this scheme should be coming “in the next few weeks.”

A small hotfix for online experiences is also on the way very soon, though it won’t have any updates to tracking included. With any luck, this update will allow Rift and Touch owners to finally put these tracking issues behind them.

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Oculus Addresses Persistent Tracking Issue Reports Following 1.11 Update

Oculus Addresses Persistent Tracking Issue Reports Following 1.11 Update

Last Friday saw Oculus release its anticipated Rift 1.11 update, along with promised improvements to tracking for the VR headset and its Touch controllers. But not everyone was satisfied with the release.

Multiple reports cropped up online following the update’s roll out, with people still having issues with multi-sensor Rift setups. In some cases users were even reporting that tracking had gotten worse since the update.

Once again, it was Nate Mitchell of Oculus’ Rift team that took to Reddit to address concerns. After initially acknowledging the issues on Twitter, Mitchell explained that many of the new reports the company was seeing related to people using either more than three sensors, which the company warned against last week, or poor positioning of the sensors themselves.

As a response, he pointed to the tracking setup guides Oculus posted last week, which give guidance on aspects like sensor placement and USB components. Mitchell did also promise that the company was “working on additional improvements to tracking quality and 3+ sensor setups” for future updates. As you can see in the comments following the post, not everyone was satisfied with Mitchell’s answer, but more fixes are on the way.

“I also wanted to mention that we’re seeing 1.11 improve tracking quality in aggregate,” Mitchell assured, speaking of the update overall, “particularly for the vast majority of users who had reported an issue pre-1.11.”

Mitchell previously said that there would be two updates to Oculus systems this month thanks to the delay in the launch of update 1.11, so look for further improvements to roll out within the next few weeks. Hopefully the company can put these tracking issues to bed with its next update; Touch and the introduction of Roomscale support with it is now two month’s old.

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Oculus to Support WebVR Through New VR Browser Codenamed ‘Carmel’

Oculus announced at Connect, the company’s annual developer conference, that they’ll be officially supporting WebVR through their new VR web browser codenamed Carmel. WebVR is an API that provides headsets access to web-based VR content.

Touted as an easy way to share VR experiences over the web, WebVR allows JavaScript developers a way of delivering simple VR content into the hands of anyone with a VR headset just by navigating to a URL (i.e. no long downloads or installs necessary).

Oculus co-founder Nate Mitchell took the stage and presented the new VR browser, stating the WebVR initiative “is going to lead to an exponential growth in VR content out there. Everyone in the future is going to have their own VR destination on the web.”

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Mitchell then introduced a number of usecases for prospective developers, some that he said could even be completed in just a few days like a web-based photo sphere site, or a 3D rendering of a new car.

webvr-carmel-oculus
a simple photo sphere ‘destination’ that lets you tour a hotel

Oculus says Carmel is optimized for performance, designed for navigation and input in VR, and will be tightly integrated with Home and “run on any Oculus device.”

Samsung’s Gear VR web browser ‘Samsung Internet’ already has preliminary support for WebVR, but the move by Oculus to support it directly and offer the tools to do so means they’ll be throwing their full weight behind the initiative.

carmel-browser

To help developers build VR web content, Oculus also announced React VR, a VR-focused version of the React open source javascript library created by Facebook in 2013 that helps developers build user interfaces for web-based content.

A developer preview of Carmel is said to come later this year along with React VR. Oculus has listed a number of real-world examples on their WebVR page to give prospective devs an idea of what to build for the coming VR web.

The post Oculus to Support WebVR Through New VR Browser Codenamed ‘Carmel’ appeared first on Road to VR.

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Getting Social – Oculus to Offer Persistent Avatars Across Multiplayer Games

Up until now, multiplayer games on Oculus Home have relied on their own individual avatar selectors, meaning you couldn’t have the exact same avatar in two different apps. In an effort to socialize the entire platform, Oculus is introducing an avatar editor that will let you style a single avatar and use it across multiple apps.

Mike Howard, product manager for Oculus Avatars, demoed the editor, changing his virtual appearance through a slider-based system. An interactive virtual mirror renders your new choices before you and even lets you physically swap out accessories using Oculus Touch, the company’s soon-to-release hand controllers.

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The new avatar editor is said to offer “more than one billion permutations,” letting you pick clothing, accessories, hair, face shape, and avatar texture.

From what we’ve seen at Connect, Oculus Avatars doesn’t provide a few things that other avatar editors do like a full body or detailed color options, meaning you’ll have to pick a single texture that will cover your entire avatar—certainly not as detailed as the Facebook social VR prototype we saw only moments earlier on stage.

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Notably, Oculus Avatars also doesn’t animate any part of the head/upper chest asset, instead opting to light up the avatar momentarily when speaking through the microphone. All of this may be necessary to maintain fluid cross compatibility when the feature launches on both Gear VR and Rift.

The Avatars SDK, according to co-founder and VP Nate Mitchell, “makes it easy to integrate Touch interactions into your game, and additionally, true hand presence. Because it brings people’s avatars into your experience, people can actually feel like themselves and easily recognize their friends.”

According to an Oculus blogpost, Avatars will be available for Rift at Touch launch and for mobile in early 2017.

The post Getting Social – Oculus to Offer Persistent Avatars Across Multiplayer Games appeared first on Road to VR.

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Oculus to Push VR Web Experiences With Own Browser Code Name Carmel

Oculus revealed that developers can make simple experiences on the web using two new pieces of software, one of which stems from React, a web making tool, and another is a whole new browser from Oculus made for virtual reality (VR).

The way in which Oculus said it was going to help users to create these experiences is with React VR, which is built on the foundations of React, letting web developers create these simple experiences easily. The way you can publish this is in a VR browser, code name Carmel, which is optimised for VR.

Carmel

Nate Mitchell took to the stage to tease what he was about to reveal, saying that web VR was the next big thing for developers: “There’s another kind of ecosystem that we think is super important, and it’s a content ecosystem of simple vr experiences that are based on web technology and are accessed via a web browser. You can think of this VR ecosystem as the VR web, and it’s going to be huge for a number of reasons.”

As explained by Mitchell, with a few lines of Java Script you can create a VR experience and instantly share it, and because it’s in a browser it isn’t going to be limited to headsets as it reaches out to anyone with a laptop or PC. It is expected to lead to an exponential growth of VR content.

Two experiences were then shown, which includes checking out hotels using 360 degree photo spheres where you can embed reviews and so on within the scene. The other example was a look inside of a Renaut car.

React VR

There will be a developer preview released soon for Carmel, including React VR alongside it.

For more on the latest from Oculus Connect 3, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.