Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
What Can You Do With Touch?
The Touch controllers adds your hands to the virtual world, opening Oculus' Rift platform to some new experiences. Touch controllers allow you to reach out and interact with virtual environments. You can pull levers, flip switches, pick up objects, or point and shoot guns.
In the first eight months of Rift availability, 99 games were made available on the Oculus Store. You would think that after three years of developer kits out in the wild, there'd be a lot more content. But judging from the list launching alongside Touch, many developers were holding off for the debut of hand controllers. Oculus is revealing more than 50 titles that either have Touch support or are built specifically for Touch controllers.
Several of the Touch-enabled games are available already on the Oculus platform, such as Crytek’s The Climb, Psytek Games’ Windlands, and nDream’s The Assembly. Other games are making their way from Steam VR over to the Oculus Store, such as Owlchemy Labs’ Job Simulator, I-illusions’ Space Pirate Trainer, and Stress Level Zero’s Hover Junkers.
Furthermore, Oculus has a few exclusive titles in its corner. Dead and Buried is a multiplayer first-person shooter developed by Gunfire Games, and The Unspoken is a competitive multiplayer wizard dueling game developed by Insomniac Games. Both are exclusive to Oculus, and the company is giving free copies to everyone who pre-ordered Touch.
Touch also opens the door for art applications on the Rift platform. Three titles launch alongside the Touch controller. Medium, from Oculus Studios, is a virtual clay molding app freely available to all Touch owners. If illustrations are more your style, Quill offers an unlimited canvas to draw anything your heart desires. Those preferring a bit of anarchy might be drawn to the Kingspray Graffiti Simulator, which lets you paint anything you'd like onto the walls of industrial buildings.
Steam Catalog
In addition to the Touch content available through Oculus' Store, Touch controllers give you access to a massive library on Valve’s Steam platform. Valve’s approach to virtual reality is more open than Oculus’. It generously allows support for other VR hardware to its platform, so most of the content playable on HTC's Vive is compatible with the Rift/Touch combination.
Steam VR is smart enough to detect the headset and controllers you have plugged into your computer. Valve even designed icons for the Rift, Oculus sensor, and Touch controllers. Curiously, Steam VR works with multiple Oculus sensors, but only shows two sensor icons. If you have a third sensor, it uses the Lighthouse icon.
Steam VR lets the Rift access HTC's Chaperone system, but relies on Oculus' drivers for the tracking calibration. Even if you don’t plan to purchase content on the Oculus Store, you must still use the Oculus software for sensor setup. Once they're calibrated, you can run the Steam VR setup to configure the SteamVR compositor boundaries and controller calibration.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Best SSDs
China fires back at Trump’s 10% tariff proposal with a 20% price cut on domestic products — Beijing's policy will negatively affect chipmakers, including Nvidia and Intel
Samsung's 4K Odyssey G70B gaming monitor plummets to $299 — all-time low is a whopping $300 savings
Chinese companies are reportedly reluctant to adopt homegrown chips — domestic solutions are technologically too far behind
