Hands On With the Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch Controllers
The Oculus Rift has come a long way since its first development kit,
and this spring the virtual reality headset will finally be available
to the public as a finalized product. I tried out the consumer version
of the Oculus Rift, along with Oculus VR's optional Touch controllers,
here at CES 2016.
The final version of the Rift is similar in design to the Oculus Rift Development Kit and the DK2:
a black plastic VR headset that you connect to a computer. This version
features its own built-in headphones, which were missing in the earlier
versions. The hardware is more powerful and complex than the
development kit versions', but the consumer model actually feels a bit
lighter on the head. I didn't notice it shifting on my nose or becoming
misaligned when I moved my head, which occasionally happened when I was
using the development kits.
The Touch by Oculus controllers are wireless hand grips equipped with
face buttons, triggers, and analog sticks similar to halves of a
conventional gamepad. They also have round, flat rings around the grips
that are studded with small reflectors and work in tandem with a pair of
positioning cameras to determine exactly where they are in space. The
positioning was surprisingly accurate; the Rift showed gray,
texture-less models of the Touch controllers floating in space before
starting the demo, and they were located precisely where they sat in
reality. I had to peek under the Rift a few times to make sure the
controllers where the Rift said they were.
I tried a sculpting program called Medium with the Rift and Touch.
The app put me in a virtual room and presented me with a large block of
featureless clay. The Touch controllers were my hands, loading various
tools selected through wheels I could access with the analog sticks. I
could "draw" with clay in three-dimensional space, adding to the lump in
front of me and building shapes around it by pulling the upper trigger
on the right controller. The lower trigger let me move and rotate the
sculpture with a wave of my hand.
The demo let me add more clay, remove clay, inflate or sand down
different parts of the sculpture, and even paint the surface with an
airbrush. A button on the left Touch controller brought up a color
palette, and I could pick any color by pointing at it with my right hand
and pulling a trigger. It even offered special features like holding up
a plane through the sculpture so I could sculpt symmetrically, and spin
the sculpture slowly while I worked with it like a lathe or a potter's
wheel.
The Touch controllers work very well, which is why it's surprising
that Oculus has postponed their release until Q3 2016. The units I
tried here felt and performed like final products, and worked flawlessly
in tandem with the Rift. However, if more time will let Oculus
eliminate any issues I might have missed in my short demo, it's a
worthwhile wait. As it is, the Touch controllers impressed me as the
most comfortable VR control system I've tried yet. It's gamepad-like
design with conventional analog sticks, face buttons, and triggers fit
well with the extensive motion-tracking of the hardware, producing a
really immersive and functional control scheme.
The consumer version of the Oculus Rift faces a notable price hurdle
the earlier versions lacked. The final Rift is available to preorder for
$xxx, almost twice as much as either of the development kits. This is
more powerful and polished hardware, but that price jump puts the Rift
up there with the PlayStation VR as a sizable investment, even without
the Touch controllers, whose price has not been announced.
