Oculus talks Touch at Connect 2, announces SDK 1.0 release

By Brad Jones September 24, 2015

zenimax oculus 500 million palmer luckey touch — eVRydayVR

Input has long been the biggest obstacle that virtual reality faces as a medium. It’s one thing to make a virtual world appear around the user, but there are even bigger challenges associated with allowing them to interact with it in a meaningful and engaging way.

Today, Oculus made a pair of big announcements about how user input is going to be handled with regard to the Rift. The first pertains to the much-lauded Touch controllers that Oculus is showing off at the event, which will ship slightly later than the Rift itself in the second quarter of 2016.

Recommended Videos

Touch will include a separate Rift sensor, which is required for use. The hardware will be distributed to developers ahead of its consumer release, allowing some time for studios to implement controls using Touch sensors into their games and projects.

The Touch developer kit will also feature another handy tool intended to make creating VR experiences a little bit easier. The avatar hands used in the Toybox demo will be included, providing a useful shortcut for creators looking to create a truly immersive experience for the user.

In other development kit news, Oculus announced a firm release date of December for the Rift SDK 1.0. Games built with this in mind will reportedly be working from day one.

Oculus also announced Medium, a tool for artists. Using the Rift in conjunction with Touch input, it will give users the ability to sculpt with virtual clay. Medium is being demonstrated at the event, and is set to ship alongside the Touch controllers when they hit retail next year.

Amid all this talk of new tech and innovative experiences, there was also a renewed focus on a lovable hedgehog that stole plenty of hearts earlier in the year. Henry debuted as a short film earlier in the year, and a new trailer is being released today for anyone at home looking for new content to take in on their DK2.

Furthermore, everything needed to create the Henry short will be made available in Unreal Engine 4 to give creative types something to experiment with.

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Brad is an English-born writer currently splitting his time between Edinburgh and Pennsylvania. You can find him on Twitter…

Computing

How to know which Mac to buy — and when to buy it

The M4 Mac mini being used in a workplace.

If you’re in the market for a new Mac (or Apple display), there’s a lot of choice ahead of you. Maybe you're interested in a lightweight MacBook Air from the selection of the best MacBooks -- or maybe one of the desktop Macs. Either way, there’s a wide variety of Apple products on offer, including some external desktop monitors.

Below you'll find the latest information on each model, including if it's a good time to buy and when the next one up is coming.
MacBook Pro

Computing

AMD Ryzen AI claimed to offer ‘up to 75% faster gaming’ than Intel

A render of the new Ryzen AI 300 chip on a gradient background.

AMD has just unveiled some internal benchmarks of its Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 processor. Although it's been a few months since the release of the Ryzen AI 300 series, AMD now compares its CPU to Intel's Lunar Lake, and the benchmarks are highly favorable for AMD's best processor for thin-and-light laptops. Let's check them out.

For starters, AMD compared the Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 to the Intel Core Ultra 7 258V. The AMD CPU comes with 12 cores (four Zen 5 and eight Zen 5c cores) and 24 threads, as well as 36MB of combined cache. The maximum clock speed tops out at 5.1GHz, and the CPU offers a configurable thermal design power (TDP) ranging from 15 watts to 54W. Meanwhile, the Intel chip sports eight cores (four performance cores and four efficiency cores), eight threads, a max frequency of 4.8GHz, 12MB of cache, and a TDP ranging from 17W to 37W. Both come with a neural processing unit (NPU), and AMD scores a win here too, as its NPU provides 50 trillion operations per second (TOPS), while Intel's sits at 47 TOPS. It's a small difference, though.

Computing

This fps-doubling app is now even better than DLSS 3

Cyberpunk 2077 on the Sony InZone M10S.

Lossless Scaling is a $7 Steam app that's flipped the idea of frame generation on its head this year. Similar to tools like Nvidia's DLSS 3 and AMD's FSR 3, Lossless Scaling offers frame generation. However, it works with any game, and with any graphics card, and it can triple or quadruple your frame rate with this frame generation. And now, the app is going further with a feature that even DLSS 3 and FSR 3 don't have.

The developer posted the 2.12 beta to Steam on Wednesday, and it adds a couple of new features. The big one is a resolution scale for LSFG, the tool's own machine learning-based frame generation algorithm. This allows you to decrease the resolution of the input frames, leading to a very minor quality loss in exchange for a fairly large performance boost. The resolution of the game doesn't change at all. You're basically giving the frame generation algorithm slightly less information to work with.