JULY 2020 PCWorld 33Throwing an object is an easy example.
Imagine picking up an object from the floor
and throwing it. How often are your hands
actually in view? When you raise your hand
and bring it back, do you watch yourself
do it? Probably not. The brain is
remarkably good at physics
calculations. You bend your arm,
draw your hand back along your
ear, then fling it forward. It’s
intuitive.
Windows MR headsets lose
track of your hands as soon as
they’re out of sight. Oh, they try to
compensate. Various sensors allow Windows
MR to approximate where it thinks your hands
might be when they leave the relatively
narrow field-of-view of those front-facing
cameras. The longer your hands are absent
though, the less accurate the estimate. It
made games like Superhot, where economy
of motion is critical, incredibly frustrating on
Windows MR headsets.
Worse, the cameras would occasionally
lose track of the entire room if all landmarks
temporarily disappeared from its sight. This
could lead to disorienting moments where
the player’s view snapped from place to
place, or the headset left the player stranded
a few feet above the floor. Again, the longer
you played in any given session, the more
likely you were to encounter issues.
The early Windows MR
headsets made me
skeptical of built-in
tracking solutions. Then
Oculus Quest (go.
pcworld.com/oqst) and
the Oculus Rift S (go.
pcworld.com/orfs) came