Does the Rift S send its camera feeds to the PC for controller tracking or does it do it onboard and send the tracked controller locations?
Perhaps the onboard hardware is capable of controller tracking as sold, but not powerful enough to enable Quest-style hand tracking. What if in addition to that, the camera data for one reason or another can't be piped over USB to the computer, either because it's missing the hardware that would do the encoding, or because there isn't enough bandwidth on the cable?
As I recall, the original Rift's outside-in tracking was extremely picky about having separate USB 3 ports for each of its tracking cameras, to the point where if you had a three-camera setup it didn't even want them on ports handled by the same USB controller on the motherboard.
Now we're saying "The Rift-S has five cameras and it's connected to the computer, surely it can just let the computer process that data." I doubt it's that easy.
Consider the fact that the Rift-S has been out of stock for months. Oculus continues to re-stock the Quest (which sells out within 24h), but we haven't seen a restock of the Rift-S in probably 3 months?
Their "Del Mar" which is coming up, is very likely not going to be a tethered headset. My money is it will be standalone like the Quest.
Oculus is trying to get the masses to adopt VR and I salute them for it. There will always be headsets like the Valve index for enthusiasts.
I think it's a smart play. Standalone VR makes it incredibly more accessible. Everyone with a Quest does the same thing, they cart it around to parties and gatherings to let people experience VR and it's a blast. Even if this wasn't intentional marketing it's the best strategy for getting the word out. I'm hoping the Del Mar is a big upgrade, if it can bring better processing and better resolution to the table hopefully with a killer feature like adaptive focus and gaze tracking then I think it'll just knock it out of the park. Regardless though it's only a matter of time until all our screens are virtual.
I mean, going forward, given the existence of Link (and that Link surprisingly actually works), there is very little reason for the Rift S to exist at all; it sucks that they sold it to people and then so quickly obsoleted it by another product that came out at the same time and cost the same amount, but other than the feeling of responsibility for those customers I can't imagine any reason for them to spend any time at all on that device line: that use case is now Quest Link; if they built and sold more of them they would just be digging themselves a deeper liability hole of more limited devices they don't want to support.
Linus Tech Tips did a pretty damn good review of the Quest + Link solution. At the time he did the review, it looked like it had some very strange black bar artifacts when turning your head quickly, which the Rift-S did not. He also described it having a slight lag in the controls.
These kinds of things are likely non-issues for your average gamer who isn't moving really fast, and isn't requiring ultra precise controls. For some people though, it's a huge deal breaker.
I'm personally very grateful for both Valve and Oculus. Oculus is serving the mass market, and doing a great job of it. I just hope in the process, we don't lose the high end consumer gear like Valve Index.
How long ago was that? The Quest link cable stuff is still in flux. Not only did they just announce a few days ago that any USB 2.0 cable should now work[1], but they note in that article that Carmack is hoping to add a new mode to take advantage of the higher bandwidth of USB 3.1.
It's entirely possible if that Linux Tech Tips review was more than a month or two ago, things might look considerably different now.
I know, it sure seems like he has a lot of skill and institutional knowledge to contribute. That said, I'm not sure what his current involvement is, I just know they referenced him in that article.
By that argument aren't the controllers experiencing more latency on RiftS than Quest already? I realize there is more post-processing with hand tracking, but given that it already experiences the latency of having to process the control actions... not really sure how this could affect it that much.
Also, you could argue the hand tracking calculations could be done faster on a PC, so even if there is some perceived latency it could balance out or be better... would really need numbers for all of this, but it does just seem very suspect that they are trying to push more things on the Quest intentionally..
