Dev Blog #8 - Oculus Rift and Touch Support(ish)

Hey Everyone! This past week introduced an update to SteamVR that added the initial Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch compatibility through SteamVR. What does this mean? Any Vive game bought through steam, should work with the Rift and Touch controllers. Because of this update, Light Repair Team #4 is now sort-of Rift/Touch compatible through SteamVR. If you have a Rift and a Touch controller, you can play Light Repair Team #4 right now, if you wanted. We're not comfortable yet calling it full support, so you won't see us changing the store page to show the Rift being supported - let me explain why. You can see me (Joe) play Light Repair Team #4 with the Oculus Rift and Touch below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMBdYcpjw_M Each headset has their recommended "supported" set-ups. For example, the Vive instructs you to put the LightHouses up high, facing each other in the corners of your playspace. This is because they're supported set-up is for roomscale VR (and thus, Standing and seated too). For the Rift and Touch, as we understand it (we could be wrong! We don't know yet!), the "supported" set-up will be two cameras on your desk about four to five feet apart, facing out and slighting inwards. We call this 180degree set up. At least, this is the set up we've been shown and you see a lot in demos. While this gives you a lot of coverage, full roomscale is not the greatest as there are a lot of roomscale tracking issues with this set up (based on our tests). If you turn around and face away from the cameras, our testing showed that you will have very bad tracking issues because you're occluding the cameras. Issues to the point where it's not even playable, unless you turn around and face the cameras. This is the recommended set up, the one that we have to assume a majority of Rift/Touch users will be using and is the reason why we're not calling Light Repair Team #4 fully Rift compatible. To play Light Repair Team #4 with the Oculus Rift and touch controller, you need to set your cameras up much like the Vive lighthouses. That is, you need to place cameras at the corners of your playspace, and face them at each other. Joe's tried both the roomscale camera set up, and the forward-facing supported set up and has found that the roomscale set up provides the best quality experience. However, the kicker is that to do roomscale Rift set ups, you need to buy some USB extenders, as the provided camera cables are not long enough for roomscale set ups. USB extenders are not necessarily the cheapest thing in the world, either. A 6 foot cable cost us $13USD at Target. Talking to other VR devs, they've had to buy upwards of 25ft cables to make roomscale Rifting work. Oculus doesn't provide long cables/extenders nor (again, as far as we understand) will they be suggesting the idea of Roomscale camera set ups. With all these things combined, it provides a barrier for consumers to set up roomscale Rift, and as such, since roomscale Rift set ups are not the officially supported camera set up, we're not going to officially call Light Repair Team #4 Rift compatible... yet. Now, you might be asking "Well, why don't you just design the game to work for the supported set up?" And the answer is: it's not that easy! There's a lot of things we'd have to do, and we'd probably need to port up from Unreal Engine