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Enhancing the Quest

tommosaur
Protege
I tried several titles on the Oculus Quest at Oculus Connect and the tracking worked very well, even for physical movement intense games.
So i am not worried about the tracking at all and i think a lot of people who are worried about that right now will feel way better about it once they try it.
(For example it is much better than the tracking on the Windows MR headsets)

But i see such worries online which seem to come from some people thinking up front that a Rift S and Quest may with an inside out tracking be like a downgrade on some ends compared to external camera sensors usage.

So i wondered, if it is technically feasible, could the Oculus fellas add the option that one could use external camera sensors on top off/together with the camera sensors on the headsets, so that that way one would get the best tracking, so even better than for the Oculus CV since combining the data from the cams on the headset with the data from the external cam sensors, gives, well, even more data for even further decreased blind spots.
(So not as requirement of course, because no need for it, just as additional option for people who want the most uber tracking)

I'd also like it if for the Quest it could be considered to add a port to it to use it with a cable as PC VR headset, too, for those who want to do that (in between) to use the pc only content on it and/or make use of the more powerful pc graphics card one may have (for again, running the content on the pc and using the quest purely as headset display, not for processing the content).

Overall i am looking forward to the Quest a lot, so these are meant as just some suggestions which i think could make even way more people of which some currently seem to have worries maybe see things way more positively and also, well, improve things further and increase use cases further, so i hope you see it as constructive suggestions.

anyway, keep it up 😃




2 REPLIES 2

BaronBoese
Explorer
I am not employed by Oculus or Facebook and am therefore not qualified to give a definite answer to that.

But since it always is sad when questions stay unanswered and i myself work in computer vision i give it a try.

So i wondered, if it is technically feasible, could the Oculus fellas add the option that one could use external camera sensors on top off/together with the camera sensors on the headsets, so that that way one would get the best tracking, so even better than for the Oculus CV since combining the data from the cams on the headset with the data from the external cam sensors, gives, well, even more data for even further decreased blind spots.

The quest headset itself is lacking the LEDs for external Constellation tracking. You would have to handle that by clip-on hardware or more elaborate vision algorithms. 

Maybe one could only be tracking the Touch controllers externally while relying on inside out tracking for the headset itself. There would have to be a calibration phase where the controllers need to be visible by both, external and internal cameras.

Besides the technical possibility it is not a sensible approach since the external sensors would need additional compute hardware that will not be adopted by the majority of consumers. Games will(and should) therefore be developed to avoid the shortcomings of the tracking system.


I'd also like it if for the Quest it could be considered to add a port to it to use it with a cable as PC VR headset, too, for those who want to do that (in between) to use the pc only content on it and/or make use of the more powerful pc graphics card one may have (for again, running the content on the pc and using the quest purely as headset display, not for processing the content).

Carmack already answered this https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1109946873622810624. The image stream would have to go trough the SOC of the Quest which performs decompression and all the other time consuming processing since the usb-c port is seemingly not used in alternate mode to carry a video signal. (This would require dedicated hardware on the quest side) 

tommosaur
Protege
hey, thanks for your reply and the additional technical insights 😃
Regarding potentially allowing to use the external camera sensors (too), yeah, i was thinking of if for using it for the headset tracking itself at all maybe detecting the headset with computer vision for when the external cam sensors track it, though i agree, likely less fast/reliable than when there are just led sensors on it which helps. 
Regarding using it for the controllers, there i thought it could be feasible no problem.
I was mostly thinking about the use case of people like me who already have a Rift and so a pc and camera sensors and are getting the Quest now, too or also people who don't have the rift but maybe a pc and would then maybe buy the quest and cam sensors to connect to the pc if they want the best tracking. My thought was like to eliminate any potential blindspots for controllers by having 1-2 cam sensors used together with the tracking already going on via the headset cams.
I agree it wouldn't make much sense if one doesn't have a pc and oculus software on it to use the external cam sensors with.

In either case, as i said, after trying the Quest i am not worried at all about the tracking, it worked great in all games i tried, was just thinking about whether this would be possible as additional option for people who are worried about maybe getting worse tracking up front before trying it.

Regarding the potential of connecting the headset to the computer, yeah, i see, would be nice though for sure 😃