The company orients its product towards indoor use, although the technology can work outdoors according to the present conditions.
Oculus he has commented in an interview with UploadVR that Oculus Insight, the absolute inside-out positioning system that integrates Quest, is indoor only, although it also points out that we have to think of it as if it were our eyes, so if we are able to see correctly, then tracking should work well.
“We have tried to make different rooms in OC5 to show a wide range of configurations. Just as Sports Scramble (or Tennis Scramble) was like living rooms, others were a larger space (Dead and Buried Arena). The easiest way to think about this is that sensors are analogous to our eyes, so if you can read a book in an environment, tracking will probably work as well. If things have enough light during the day, you can probably follow up. It is for indoor use only, so it is not for outdoor use“, says Sean Liu, Head of Hardware Product Management at Oculus.
Liu’s words do not mean that we can not go to an outdoor site and make use of the device, because it will effectively depend on the light conditions that the tracking works better or worse, since even a sunny day with a lot of light can negatively affect its performance. Now, as pointed out by UploadVR, it is possible that the company says is only for interiors for the possible risks that it could pose for the user to be in the street fully insulated, therefore not the same is the case with augmented reality devices, where do we looking at the real world.
Insight works in a similar way to the positioning of Microsoft viewers, because in the end they are cameras that need a sufficient amount of light to do their job. In this sense, Microsoft also recommends that where we are there is enough lighting. “Because the device works by observing its environment, there must be enough light for the space to be observed. There must also be enough distinctive visual features (in other words, objects, contrast points, etc.) for the tracking system to work, ” they explain on the Windows MR page. Precisely, it will not only be the light, but also the objects and contrast points that make the positioning correct.
Liu stresses that he has done a lot of things with this viewer, but that they are definitely focused on being used only indoors and accompanied by the Guardian system, which will be able to remember the configurations of multiple places.
As for the tracking limits, they have not yet shared the details, although they do comment that as we have already seen it will support higher room scale sizes than we are used to today.
