Literally. I can't imagine how they're still justifying the Rift at this point. Is the room scale tracking somehow inferior when you sit in a chair?
Nope. The Rift is definitely more comfortable for most people and looks more like a finished product, but that's about all the good I can say about it. I used a Rift demo station about a week before my Vive arrived and it immediately made me happy about my choices. Roomscale is huge and while Oculus technically can be used that way the official support is still largely based around forward facing.
Oculus is still more focused on non-roomscale experiences for now, but they're already starting to change how they talk about it, no doubt in preparation for Touch. The tech is there, the games are there (from Vive-land), the only thing really missing right now are the controllers.
Oculus has burnt a lot of good will in the developer and consumer communities, with the delays, the shady exclusivity deals, the walled garden app store, the broken promises on open source and Linux and OS X support, etc.
I have money, and I love mac, but I won't be buying Mac Pro for $3k just to play with the tech.
Oculus is playing a game with their specs. On one hand, it makes their peripheral look like really cutting edge technology if it can only run on the latest and greatest hardware. And on the other, it keeps them from having to try to fulfill even more orders over what they have already proven they cannot handle.
Simple graphics + room scale VR is an amazing experience. AAA games need whizbang graphics features to be able to compete with each other because they haven't had any new gameplay features to show off in nearly 15 years. But a lot of this effects are unnecessary in VR--sometimes even a bad idea! Normal mapping, for example, is has been reliably shown to cause motion sickness in people with a relatively high ratio of estrogen to testosterone (not just women, but men with hormonal imbalances. Women with high testosterone seem to do fine).
I think Valve and Oculus understand that AAA game studios don't have a lot to offer to VR. You're not going to really adapt Call of Duty to the Vive. So they are banking on the huge cadre of indie developers to rapidly make the first content for them. And that is going to mostly be fairly new devs using Unity, not really understanding what they are doing other than following tutorials. Optimisation is not exactly a strong point.
This paper talks about some observations and some of the issues that still need to be covered: http://www.danah.org/papers/transtech.pdf
And a further paper from Dr. Boyd going into more detail on virtual reality more specifically: http://www.danah.org/papers/sexvision.pdf
The new drivers removed my ability to experiment with WebVR. I could no longer use the hardware not due to limitations with my computer, but limitations imposed for marketing purposes.
Meanwhile, I've got a Windows PC that I've thrown together over the years, I just put a new SSD in it, and I'm waiting on buying either a new RX 480 or 1080, and I've got a 3D-capable PC, more capable and also much cheaper than the $3K Mac.
Even if the Rift's touch controllers are released later and are superior, they'd be hard pressed to be much more superior.
Yeah I basically agree with you, I just don't see it as a much of problem for Oculus in the long term given how early all this is.
Kind of reminds me of the Makerbot fiasco. Like Makerbot, Oculus has lost much of the early adopter community, but if they can hang on long enough, they can capture the mainstream adoption wave and it might not matter.
"Valve's work up to 2013 had made real-time tracking in VR a viable proposition. But although it had worked out the fundamentals, it wasn't about to build its own headset. And why would it? The public had already voted with its wallet, funding Oculus to the tune of $2.4 million. In Jan. 2014 Valve announced that it would collaborate with Oculus on tracking to "drive PC VR forward." It also said it had no plans to release its own VR hardware, although it noted that "this could change" in the future.
It's clear that at some point Oculus and Valve's cooperative spirit fell apart. It could be that Oculus and Valve disagreed on what VR should be: The Rift and Vive certainly offer different experiences. But it's also been suggested that communication from Oculus ground to a halt in the months after the Facebook acquisition, which forced Valve to explore other paths. It's unlikely that anyone will go on the record to confirm that for years. All we know is that in early January, Luckey was reportedly calling Valve's tech "the best virtual reality demo in the world," and by late spring, HTC and Valve were meeting to hammer out a deal."
I've had a lot more time in a Vive and am going to get to compare to a Rift again soon but my recollection is that the Oculus had a better display. I also might not have "dialed in" my Vive well. The Oculus was setup for me by a friend who is an Oculus engineer, so I suspect he set it up correctly. I'm going to read up on tuning the Vive display right now. :)