No Oculus Rift should be without these controllers.
When the Oculus Rift (review) launched back in March there was something noticeably missing, and the competing HTC Vive (review) and PlayStation VR (review) both highlighted the Rift’s lack of motion-tracked controllers to let you naturally interact with virtual objects and environments. They may be late to the party, but the Oculus Touch controllers make up for their tardiness by being the best hand-tracked controllers around.
The major feature that makes the $200 Touch controllers feel better than the Vive’s alternative is a much greater sense of control over your in-game hands. By holding the index-finger trigger you can grab something, but holding the middle-finger trigger on the grip means you can grab an object like a gun and still have your index finger free to pull the trigger. Even cooler, the buttons and thumbstick on the controller's face know when your thumb is just resting on them, not just when you’re pushing a button, so by lifting your thumb and holding both triggers you can give an in-game thumbs up. Gestures like that turn your hand from a blunt instrument into something with some finer control, and it feels like a big step in the direction of having fully articulated virtual fingers – though we’re nowhere near there yet.
In keeping with the Rift itself, setting up the Touch controllers is quick and easy thanks to the on-screen instructions in the Oculus client. They wirelessly sync directly to the Rift headset, which is a blessing and a curse. The good news is that you don’t need another USB dongle occupying a port on your PC, which is nice because a Touch-enabled Rift setup already requires three USB ports, plus an optional one if you want to leave your Xbox One controller dongle plugged in. The bad news is that you’ll never be able to use Touch controllers with any other VR headset – they are tied exclusively to the Rift.
“
It took me less than 10 minutes to get up and running.
The Touch package also includes a second Rift sensor, which plugs into yet another USB port to give you improved tracking. The recommended placement is to set the two sensors spaced several feet apart in front of you, which gives a pretty wide area to walk around in. My play area is roughly the recommended five feet by seven feet, which allows me to comfortably sidestep bullets and duck under punches. The setup is a little sensitive when it comes to positioning the sensors, but all in all it took me less than 10 minutes to get up and running, including drawing a the border around my play area to warn me when I was about to punch my computer screen during a game (just like the Vive’s Chaperone system).
Unlike the PlayStation VR’s flimsy Move controllers, Touch controllers feel very well built, and they’re half the size of the Vive’s controllers. The black plastic is solid and dense enough that the delicate-looking tracking ring that encircles your fingers barely flexes at all when pushed, and my pair has survived a few accidental bangs without any marks. Each controller has seven buttons – an analog trigger, a second trigger button for your middle finger, two face buttons, a clickable thumbstick, and an Oculus Home button, which puts it roughly on par with the Vive (which technically can have more virtual buttons using its touchpad). The only comfort issue I have with them is that I have large hands, so the handle is a little shorter than I’d like and makes my pinky finger feel like it’s slipping off. Also, because the right and left controllers are built to fit that hand, they can be awkward to pick up when you have a headset on, even when you can see them represented in the virtual world. (That’s relative to the Vive and Move controllers, which are ambidextrous).
“
Check out this awesome battery compartment cover.
In a week of moderate use both batteries still say they have full charge, even when most of that use has been in games that make frequent use of the satisfying rumble for gun kick (such as the included Dead & Buried shooting gallery) or the like. The cover for the single AA battery in each controller is magnetically held in place and feels surprisingly solid – I’ve never said the words “Hey, come check out this awesome battery compartment cover” to anybody about anything until now.
Tracking has been excellent with only rare glitches, and plenty accurate enough to do some elaborate things with the included art programs, Medium and Quill. Quill is similar to Google’s striking Tiltbrush, which allows you to paint in 3D space as though a sparkler were to leave a permanent trail through the air, but with more Photoshop-like options, such as layers. Medium is more of a sculpting tool that allows you to paint with volume and then carve out pieces to find the shape you want in the virtual clay. If you’ve never used a program like this, it’s revelatory.
Where the Touch still can’t quite keep up with the Vive is that, like the PlayStation VR, it has a blind spot behind you where its view of your hands is blocked by your body. Its two sensors mean this dead space is smaller than what the PSVR’s single-camera viewpoint creates, but it’s definitely noticeable: in games like Job simulator, The Unspoken, and the Robo Recall demo, I’ve run into plenty of occasions where I turn 180 degrees to shoot an enemy or reach for an item and find my hand stops before it reaches the intended target. Oculus has a solution for this, in that you can buy a third sensor for another $80 to cover the last angle and achieve full room-scale VR tracking, but of course that occupies yet another USB port and might require a USB extension cable.
There’s a fair amount of software available in the Oculus Store that makes use of the Touch at launch, including standouts like the exclusive The Unspoken (which comes free with preorders) as well as multiplatform hits like Serious Sam VR, Space Pirate Trainer, Job Simulator, and Surgeon Simulator. On top of that, if you’ve enabled the option to allow non-Oculus Store games to run on your Rift you can play many games on Steam that were built for the Vive, though some of them will show virtual Vive controllers in your hands instead of the Touch controllers you’re actually holding. I was even able to get the Vive-only Google Earth VR to work by dropping a single DLL file into the directory, and it’s spectacular.
The Verdict
If you have an Oculus Rift, the Touch controllers are an absolutely must-have accessory. With these comfortable and versatile controllers, Oculus has finally closed most of the gap with the competing Vive when it comes to providing millimeter-accurate hand tracking in virtual reality, and surpasses it in the dexterity of your virtual hands. The only major weakness is that the out-of-the-box set doesn’t give full 360-degree coverage, so unless you buy another sensor it’s easy to lose track of your orientation and end up reaching for something that’s blocked by your body. Even so, adding hand tracking to your VR setup opens up many worlds full of possibilities, and the Touch controllers are the finest option available.
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire