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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