Oculus Explains How Room-Scale VR Taxes Your USB Ports

Megalith

Megalith

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Oculus has elaborated on the kind of USB bandwidth their room-scale VR system relies on, but some would believe they are only embarrassing themselves. That is because HTC’s solution, Lighthouse, does a lot of the same with less hardware and bandwidth requirements. Here is an older article that goes into some of their differences.

Most home PC owners don’t really push their USB very hard. You might connect an HD webcam, but many devices (other than external storage) don’t have a very high bandwidth requirement. If you connect three Oculus sensors—each sending and managing a ton of data locally—you can run into problems when they try to send more data than the USB host controller can handle. That’s why we recommend only connecting two sensors in USB 3.0 mode to a single USB host controller and connecting the third sensor in USB 2.0 mode. That said, in our experience connecting two of three sensors to USB 3.0 and one to USB 2.0 works just fine. These guidelines are here to help you try other configurations or to potentially improve some USB issues with your particular computer setup.
 
Would love to see hardocp take a look at motherboard manufacturers that connect up to 10 usb 3.0 ports to a single controller which can only support a maximum of 2 high speed devices.
 
They should have tested whether it actually needs USB 3.0 and what happens if you only use USB 2.0.
My 2 sensors report being connected at USB 2.0 speed but they perform flawlessly.

Vive roomscale is done right, but so is Rift now.
The number of times I've moved my sensors, knocked them over, changed the angle and they still track as if first calibrated.

I bought the Vive, image quality was too poor and the headset too heavy and too front heavy. Earphones are a joke.
After a few weeks trying to get it working well and getting zero support I gave up. It was sad having a VR kit in a box and not wanting to use it.
Rift is by far the better headset and the Touch controllers perfect it.
This is what I was waiting for.
The only negative is Faceplant.
 
The irony is that, while the Vive doesn't require usb 3.0, it also doesn't work right with a lot of onboard usb 3.0 (and 2.0/3.0 combo) controllers.

The biggest symptoms are either the VR world being very laggy with the camera enabled (3.0 port), or the controllers not syncing wirelessly to the headset (2.0 port a 2.0/3.0 motherboard)
 
Jim Kim said:
Patiently waiting for this tech to mature and drop in price, ie improve.
Click to expand...

The sad part about that is the catch there. If enough people don't buy it now while in the current stage it will not get the money it needs to keep improving and will die off for now until reborn later as another new and immature product. So people are needed to buy it now to help drive improvements to the technology and push it forward while enough people can sit back and wait for that day to come.
 
Exavior said:
The sad part about that is the catch there. If enough people don't buy it now while in the current stage it will not get the money it needs to keep improving and will die off for now until reborn later as another new and immature product. So people are needed to buy it now to help drive improvements to the technology and push it forward while enough people can sit back and wait for that day to come.
Click to expand...

Could agree more. I think the tech I'm using with the Vive I has was well worth the price. I think the problem here is that the tech is actually pretty good right now and worth the price. It's expensive but not really, not for people that are used to spending tons on money to play games. We'll see. I think VR/AR is well beyond promising, it literally can take anything and project that into 3D space with the ability to interact with it. I just don't see that idea ever going away.
 
Exavior said:
The sad part about that is the catch there. If enough people don't buy it now while in the current stage it will not get the money it needs to keep improving and will die off for now until reborn later as another new and immature product. So people are needed to buy it now to help drive improvements to the technology and push it forward while enough people can sit back and wait for that day to come.
Click to expand...

I believe the only hope is the training industry, specifically public safety. Firefighters, Paramedics/EMTS, incident command, Law Enforcement--there are many cerebral challenges that are difficult to train on...VR Training could solve those training woes. Particularly in my industry (firefighting/paramedic) where many areas are seeing a huge decline in fires due to effective building codes and fire prevention. While that's normally a good thing, it is also breeding a generation of firefighters (and incident commanders) who have limited practical experience. VR training could help fill this gap and it's not like a fire department couldn't afford a $4000 gaming PC with VR headset.

If this VR training industry was ignited, it would help bring down costs for consumers--while the PC hardware will still be unreliastic for the average consumer to buy, the hardware that powers it would probably come down in price or be iterated to something with more incremental business value.

Yeah, I'm working on something...
 
Exavior said:
The sad part about that is the catch there. If enough people don't buy it now while in the current stage it will not get the money it needs to keep improving and will die off for now until reborn later as another new and immature product. So people are needed to buy it now to help drive improvements to the technology and push it forward while enough people can sit back and wait for that day to come.
Click to expand...

Yep. It has to start somewhere. But the Vive for example is already so far along that you're missing out fence sitting for a v2. Everyone should try a Vive or Ridt in their current incarnations. Incredible.
 
^ He is right.
Rift "is" the experience I was looking for.

If you are into racing games, there are quite a few that you will play every day.
I'm playing Project Cars on VR at the moment, its bloody fantastic.
Absolutely fantastic!
Do what you can to try VR.

I had a carpet fitter here a month ago who was interested in a new PC.
So I had a chat with him and showed him VR.
He was blown away just with the Oculus shop lol.
Then I let him play Doom 3 BFG (with HD and VR mods) and he crapped himself.
It was really funny seeing how scared he was to even look round a corner.

I'm building him a VR capable PC heh.
 
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Kind of what's been said. VR will likely go to movies and training/educaion for a time and then come back to gaming onces it cheaper and more developed/accepted.
 
Current VR is good... but has so much room to be better. If Oculus can bring true roomscale (and helps mitigate the cable hell of three USB ports) it will be much better than it is now. I want functional parity with the Vive, and I do appreciate the higher number of big-budget games on Oculus.

I've got a Vive... and that needs better tracking, a cable that's about 2 ft longer (I'm well within the recommended size of a usable area, and my cables still snag), better image quality, headphones, and wireless.
 
DPI said:
Yep. It has to start somewhere. But the Vive for example is already so far along that you're missing out fence sitting for a v2. Everyone should try a Vive or Ridt in their current incarnations. Incredible.
Click to expand...
HTC has already announced what ver 2.0 will be, and the headset itself is still the same as ver 1.0, only the headband is different (and it might have wireless though a bundled add-on). Everything that is new on ver 2.0 can also be bought separately and put on a ver 1.0 vive headset
 
Nenu said:
If you are into racing games, there are quite a few that you will play every day.
I'm playing Project Cars on VR at the moment, its bloody fantastic.
Absolutely fantastic!
Click to expand...

Car racing games, so far, are the only ones I get motion sickness with. WHenever the car goes into a corner or over a crest My insides try to adjust like they would in real life, but instead push my organs around. After trying for a few minutes and getting horribly sick, I have no desire to try again....
 
Accursed said:
Car racing games, so far, are the only ones I get motion sickness with. WHenever the car goes into a corner or over a crest My insides try to adjust like they would in real life, but instead push my organs around. After trying for a few minutes and getting horribly sick, I have no desire to try again....
Click to expand...
The very first race I had was in Go Karts and spun on the first corner.
My head felt like it spun round with my eyes at the back of my head, for a moment I was quite disoriented.
I realised this is a known effect (and would probably happen in real life too) so bottled it and continued.
The next time it happened wasnt half as bad and very quickly it became normal.

Maybe you can acclimatise by going round tracks a lot slower and speed up each lap.
ie not racing, just getting used to it.

imo its so realistic you are affected as you would be in real life.
The same advice applies there, get used to it somehow.
 
Exavior said:
The sad part about that is the catch there. If enough people don't buy it now while in the current stage it will not get the money it needs to keep improving and will die off for now until reborn later as another new and immature product. So people are needed to buy it now to help drive improvements to the technology and push it forward while enough people can sit back and wait for that day to come.
Click to expand...
Oculus guys told us that Facebook would be the savior of VR and bring vast resources into its development.



...for shopping and similar activities, though.
 
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