Oculus Rift - Position tracking allows seeing through objects

Moving a character right up to an object and then moving the Oculus Rift in the direction (via physical movement and positional tracking) of the object allows the view to move right into the object. On the FPS template, this allows seeing into the cubes and through the walls. This was on a totally vanilla build of the FPS C++ template.

I can think of a number of things to try, but in hopes of saving some time, perhaps someone can tell me whether:

  1. this is considered a bug and will be fixed.

  2. this is known behavior and a code modification takes care of it. If so, what needs to be changed?

  3. this is known behavior and a character blueprint change fixes it. If so, what needs to be changed?

  4. this is just a box brush issue and switching to static mesh takes care of it.

Configuration info:

UE version 4.4.2

Oculus runtime version 0.4.2

Rift firmware: 2.12

Thanks in advance.

I am not a Epic developer but I can pretty confidently say this is a known issue and it is up to the developer on how he/she wants to address it. Some games may want this (maybe player is a ghost or something). For others I think the best option would be to detect collision of the eyes and the world and then black out the screen. Pushing the player’s body away from the wall (so that the head is no longer moving into the wall) will probably cause sim sickness and that is always bad.

Hi

This is a known issue with the Oculus DK2. It is not specific to UE4, but is related to the nature of the Oculus head tracking. Essentially, using UE4 to control the head/view while in the Oculus will cause users to experience disorientation (aka Sim Sickness). Because of this, we do not by default limit the movement of the head.

What you could do to circumvent the issues you are seeing is either MattOstgards’ suggestion of fading the screen to black or you could design your game around it with extra wide collision volumes. With wider collision, you will not have to worry about a player sticking their head out of a wall without getting outside of the Oculus’ camera’s tracking area.

Let me know if that helped.

Hi ,

It is good to know the situation and not to wait for a ‘fix’, so very helpful. Thanks.

I have experimented and found that 48 units of extra collision width is sufficient, and found an easy way to assign an expanded collision box to static meshes, so effectively have a solution.

But modifying the player capsule radius also seems to work. Is there is a reason not to do that rather than via collision boxes for each object?

That is also a good work-around as far as I can tell. I just did not think to try it. The only potential issues you may encounter would involve moving through tight areas or if you had AI with large spherical capsules, but they wouldn’t need it I suppose. Let us know if you do encounter any side-effects, as our VR team will be interested in investigating it.

Thank you

Will do. Thanks again for your help.

I adressed this particular issue by having the screen fade to black. In the Oculus Recommendations requirement, it is implied that increasing collision radius can have the effect of removing the player from the experience, since he can’t get near to anything in the game.

Remember this problem will also occur for EVERY object in your game, be it another character, dynamic objects, other geometry in your scene, etc…