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Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

developer.oculus.com

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Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#11

Post by whywhywhywhy »

Impossible wrote: post #6
gegtik wrote: post #5

I really want to know why this is feasible for the Quest but not the Rift S, given that both have Inside-Out tracking (ie. IR cameras mounted on the headset). In fact, the Rift S has 5 cameras to the Quests's 4 so it should be at least as capable shouldn't it?

Internal company politics and prioritization of Quest. It's possible that hand tracking will come to Rift S, but it might be a side effect of wanting to support it with the Quest link cable.

Just the reality that headsets like Quest are the true future of VR, PCVR is an evolutionary dead end a very small percentage of people who can afford them want a gaming PC tower in their home, PCVR is a fraction of a fraction of percentage.

I own both and demoing my Rift on a high spec system my friends were blown away and the first question was "Can it run on my macbook?" Then thats where the idea of owning VR died for them.

Demoed my Quest and one person bought one within 2 minutes of taking the headset off, took his to a family BBQ and two more people there bought it after trying it for a few minutes.

I still enjoy many PCVR games but this is just reality.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#12

Post by boolcow »

MikusR wrote: post #7
gegtik wrote: post #5

I really want to know why this is feasible for the Quest but not the Rift S, given that both have Inside-Out tracking (ie. IR cameras mounted on the headset). In fact, the Rift S has 5 cameras to the Quests's 4 so it should be at least as capable shouldn't it?

Quest does the processing in the headset and it is very probably accelerated.

Rift S is connected to a far more powerful gaming PC. It seems like Oculus simply treats the Rift S and their customers as a second-class.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#13

Post by mentat »

boolcow wrote: post #12
MikusR wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quest does the processing in the headset and it is very probably accelerated.

Rift S is connected to a far more powerful gaming PC. It seems like Oculus simply treats the Rift S and their customers as a second-class.

Latency even over a few feet can matter.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#14

Post by rubicon33 »

latchkey wrote: post #10

Oh nice! I just bought Quest over the weekend from a guy off craigslist who was selling them at cost and still wrapped in plastic. Fantastically impressed with things. Totally worth the $500. The games are amazing, but what is really impressing me is all the vr video content. The ability to "stand" on a stage while the orchestra plays Mozart all around you is mind blowing. It is neat to see them pushing the boundarie…

Props to the guy selling them at cost. Easily could have made an additional $50-$100 if he wanted to.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#15

Post by rubicon33 »

boolcow wrote: post #12
MikusR wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quest does the processing in the headset and it is very probably accelerated.

Rift S is connected to a far more powerful gaming PC. It seems like Oculus simply treats the Rift S and their customers as a second-class.

This is definitely looking more and more true.

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.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#16

Post by wlesieutre »

boolcow wrote: post #12
MikusR wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quest does the processing in the headset and it is very probably accelerated.

Rift S is connected to a far more powerful gaming PC. It seems like Oculus simply treats the Rift S and their customers as a second-class.

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.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#17

Post by mrlala »

mentat wrote: post #13
boolcow wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rift S is connected to a far more powerful gaming PC. It seems like Oculus simply treats the Rift S and their customers as a second-class.

Latency even over a few feet can matter.

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..

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#18

Post by saurik »

rubicon33 wrote: post #15
boolcow wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rift S is connected to a far more powerful gaming PC. It seems like Oculus simply treats the Rift S and their customers as a second-class.

This is definitely looking more and more true. 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 masse…

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.

Re: Oculus: Hand Tracking Updates

#20

Post by rgovostes »

Apple's first published ML paper[1] described how they trained a neural network to estimate eye gaze. To augment the limited data set of labeled eye photos, they rendered synthetic eyes and then used adversarial training to make them match the real-life data set.

This paper came out several months before the iPhone X introduced Face ID with eye gaze tracking, so it can be seen as a hint of things that were to come.

What's intriguing to me is that the paper also talks about doing the same with synthetic depth maps of hands, adding details such as occlusion and imperfectly-captured edges. With Apple investing heavily in ARKit, and rumors of an AR headset, it seems like hand tracking is inevitable.

1: https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.07828

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