Last month we started experimenting with Oculus Touch (they’re really awesome controllers… I’ve written my first impressions here and here) and we’ve also made our first experiments in using Oculus Touch with ImmotionRoom system. This video showcases some of the experiments we’ve made.

From those tests resulted clearly the differences between the use of Oculus Touch and the one of our ImmotionRoom system, that employs Kinects with virtual reality headsets to obtain full body VR. These are very similar to the ones that we’ve already announced in our previous post where we made a comparison between ImmotionRoom and HTC Vive solution.

Oculus Touch is clearly amazing because of its precision and stability: despite the fact that Vive is better in room-scale tracking, Oculus Touch still do a great job. Infrared tracking with 2 or 3 cameras has some glitches, but it is stable, responsive and precise. ImmotionRoom uses Kinect tracking, which has not been made with virtual reality in mind, so it is surely slower and less precise. You can see this at the beginning of the video, where you can see the same avatar of the player with ImmotionRoom and Touch together: Touch is faster and more precise, while ImmotionRoom avatar’s hands are fairly slow and jitter a lot.

But what Touch still lacks is the use of full body: when something has fallen to the floor in Oculus First Contact, I tried to kick it, but my avatar had no feet. With ImmotionRoom you have your full body and this improves the presence enormously. Try to look better the secondary third-person avatars in the video: full female avatars are something that makes you feel like you’re interacting with another human being, while Oculus Avatar SDK blue partial avatars are obviously a synthetic object. Futhermore with ImmotionRoom you can kick objects and even walk nausea-free in VR walking in place in real life, like I show in the video. Finally, with Immotionroom you can have your hands free of controllers and this is a great advantage if you have to put on and off your headset lot of times. By the way, if you’re interested, you can download ImmotionRoom and try it for free now by clicking on this link.

So, there are pros and cons in both solutions… but, wait a moment… why not use both? ;)

We’ll keep you updated!