Oculus Interface thing: visual angle in login screen

carlfink

In another thread here I (let's be honest) whined about having to log into the Oculus app over and over. I figured out why this was happening, and it should have been obvious. If I log into my iPhone to use that app, the Oculus app is automatically logged out. As a developer, I have to test everything on both platforms.

It's a painful process, partly because my company uses pretty long email addresses. It's unnecessarily difficult, though, because the on-screen keyboard that you have to type on with the handheld pseudo-laser-pointer controller is very far from the field that you are typing into, in terms of on-screen location. Since using the virtual keyboard requires a lot of concentration (you are pressing small keys with an easily-accidentally-moved spotlight effect from the remote), your eyes lock onto the letter you're selecting. The problem is, if you type the wrong letter (and you will), you won't immediately realize it, because your gaze is nowhere near the field the letter appears in. It is literally in your peripheral vision, because the headsets have such a wide and tall apparent display.

Now you have to correct something  you might have typed 12 letters ago. (By the tenth time you log into the app on the same day, you're in a big hurry and are trying to type really fast.) But there are no arrow keys on the virtual keyboard, and you can't use the remote to "click" in the middle of the email address or password. All you can do is backspace over everything you laboriously typed and retype the whole thing.

The Oculus OS itself does better here. In most of their screens:

1. The virtual keyboard is closer to the field you type into, and/or
2. It's displayed in a more compact manner, taking up half the area that the CVR keyboard does. That doesn't necessarily sound like an advantage, but it is, because it minimizes the amount of remote control movement needed to type stuff.

My suggestion: emulate the screen of the Oculus Browser search, with its curved keyboard (but maybe make the keyboard smaller?) and move the keyboard to directly under the fields for email address and password.

hvaughan-2540

I've had the same problem. I've created a super simple password which helps but it still takes a while to login. We could do with a guest user override in the app settings to remove the login process when testing or where we don't need to keep the user analytics. Or some voice recognition where you can speak your email and password (yes, its not 100% secure).

CarlJFink

Well, it has been two years. And no improvement at all. This is something that I'd expect one developer to fix in a week, including testing. Please?

johnb

This last post was two weeks after the App was updated to address the issue

CarlJFink

johnb said:

This last post was two weeks after the App was updated to address the issue

Interestingly, my headset has not updated and will not update when I manually check. I wonder if it's just that the Oculus Go is no longer supported (by Meta, I mean, no criticism of ELB).

johnb

Yes, The Oculus store stopped allowing updates for the Go about two years ago. They no longer accept builds from developers, but do keep the store open with the old versions. The Go on the store is at version 2.47, the current release for headsets is 2.76, although the Quest has a specific update that just went out yesterday as 2.77.

I'm quite surprised you have a Go that still works, we had about 10 here that we used for development and testing, they all have died for various reasons. We have still been producing builds for the Go, which you can sideload, you can get it here: https://public.cenariovr.com/builds/Go/CenarioVR.apk.

We will also stop updating builds for the Go at the end of this calendar year, as we really don't have any way to test the builds, and we will be updating to the latest Oculus SDK which does not support the Go.

CarlJFink

johnb said:

... We have still been producing builds for the Go, which you can sideload, you can get it here: https://public.cenariovr.com/builds/Go/CenarioVR.apk.

We will also stop updating builds for the Go at the end of this calendar year, as we really don't have any way to test the builds, and we will be updating to the latest Oculus SDK which does not support the Go.

Thanks, John. We are investigating replacements literally even as I type. (It came up in the meeting I just left.)