Oculus Rift now has full room-scale tracking

What is widely considered to be one of the best feature of HTC's Vive headset is now fully supported on Facebook's Oculus Rift—room-scale motion tracking. Now when you put on a Rift headset and walk around, your movements will be captured and duplicated in VR.

Oculus has been working on adding room-scale motion tracking for some time now, ever since its Touch motion controllers went on sale last December. However, it was listed as an "experimental" feature in the previous 1.14 version of the Rift software. Then two weeks ago, Oculus added room-scale motion tracking to its 1.15 update, which at the time was available for public testing. That update is now available as a stable release for all Rift owners, and as such room-scale tracking is now an official feature of the Rift.

This adds a new level of immersion to VR. Prior to adding room-scale motion tracking, movements were limited to standing or sitting in one spot with the Rift detecting 360-degree head and hand movements. Now you can walk around a room. As before, this requires three sensors (using two sensors for 360-degree tracking is still listed as experimental).

The 1.15 software update also adds a warning when you plug your Rift headset into the wrong GPU on your PC. This appears both during setup and when navigating to Settings > Devices.

In addition, Oculus added a notification when antivirus software blocks the installation of an application. The company also added a short video about safety when using the Rift and Touch, along with an optional toggle for health and safety reminders within the UI.

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).