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Oculus VR News | March 29, 2024

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Valve's Chaperone System Will Support the Oculus Rift

Valve's Chaperone System Will Support the Oculus Rift

Image courtesy of: Oculus

Staff Writer

Virtual reality enthusiasts and consumers, in general, are eagerly anticipating the wide release of a high-end virtual reality head-mounted display (HMD) to hit the market. The Oculus and HTC Vive are two headsets drawing the most attention, and fans are wondering what features might they be missing, especially if they can only afford to buy one. 

While the Vive may offer some benefits over the Rift, it appears one of the interesting features developed by Valve will be available on both devices. According to Engadget, the Chaperone System on the HTC Vive will be compatible with the Rift. This unique system is designed to take advantage of an immersive room-scale VR experience and will help you keep a safe distance from any boundaries within a defined area of the room, as you walk around while wearing a headset. As you get close to the edge of this space, an outline of a virtual grid is displayed in front of you.

With both the Rift and Vive supporting the ability to walk around while using the system, this is very important. The last thing you want is to collide with furniture or walls while wearing your headset. In addition, it allows the device’s front-mounted camera to detect whether there are any objects or people in your path. This is useful if you want to grab a drink from your side table, or find a chair and sit down without needing to take off the headset.

Unfortunately, since the Rift does not have a front-mounted camera, there isn’t an option for it to detect objects or people in front of you. However, with Valve’s announcement of making the Chaperone system available on the Rift we expect it will be limited to just defining the specific area where you intend to use it.

Despite the lack of a camera, the Rift being able to use Valve’s Chaperone system is still very useful and is definitely great to see this type of open support across other VR platforms by would-be “rivals”, which ultimately benefits everyone.