It feels like they're trying to exclude anyone who wants to play non-Oculus-published games.
It's in here somewhere. It's also extensively covered in the hour breakout session by the folks who implemented it, which is uploaded somewhere though I can't find the link atm.
My thinking is: The Rift S is 99.99% used for "serious" gaming and PCVR will always be that way. For serious gaming you'll probably need some kind of controllers for the near future, since you want that fidelity and haptic feedback. Now, controllers could be replaced some day by braceletes or what not, but this is not going to happen next year.
The Quest and its successors (i.e. stand-alone VR), on the other hand, is and will be more and more used for lighter gaming, video, browsing, productivity, fitness, social etc. Often times, hand-tracking will be enough without the need for controllers.
Therefore, they focus their resources on bringing hand-tracking only to the Quest.
I've given my Quest to countless people to try out and while every single person is blown away, many / most of them are challenged to use the controllers as anything more than simple pointing devices without significant training. With hand tracking that all goes away. You just use your hands how you normally use them and it "just works". It's similar to how the original iPhone captured everybody's imaginations because it offered such intuitive gestures to control its UI.
If you see the Quest as their "mass market" device and then you consider that their top priority is to knock over every barrier that stops it spreading like wildfire, then it's a no brainer to eliminate the controllers.
It's doable, but you probably can't just drop the implementation for hand-tracking on one platform and have it work on the other.
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.
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.
These kinds of things are likely non-issues for your average gamer who isn't moving really fast, and isn't requiring ultra precise controls. For some people though, it's a huge deal breaker.
I'm personally very grateful for both Valve and Oculus. Oculus is serving the mass market, and doing a great job of it. I just hope in the process, we don't lose the high end consumer gear like Valve Index.
It's entirely possible if that Linux Tech Tips review was more than a month or two ago, things might look considerably different now.
He talks about "lag with lag compensation" when referring to some of the controls on the quest v.s. the rift-s
Hopefully that has improved, as I bought a quest and it arrives tomorrow! CV1 owner.
Also... Is Carmack still working on Oculus stuff? That's awesome. I got really sad when I heard he was leaving Oculus to work on general AI.
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..
So they rather doubled down on the more promising form factor
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.
PCVR is no more niche than the demographics for Far Cry 5. If you have the hardware to run a modern AAA game on PC, all you're really missing at that point is the headset. And I don't see Ubisoft refusing to make games for PC because there are too few people with powerful enough PCs. As GPU tech continues to develop and higher performance reaches lower price points, it'll also become more accessible to more people. Though you can already pay 200-250 Euros for a decent GPU now and it'll be more than sufficient for VR gaming.
High end PC is a small fraction of those installs.
Absolutely agree with this, literally anyone who can use the headset is able to sculpt a 3D model in Oculus Medium that resembles what they want. Same can't be said for any non-vr 3D modelling software, huge potential in the creative industries.
Still niche and not mainstream though.