According to rumors and reports, the Oculus Touch hand controllers are hopefully appearing in the next few months, enabling room-scale experiences with the Rift headset. When you're gaming in room-VR, though, one of the concerns is simply not smashing your head into things. Nate Mitchell from Oculus let the Twittersphere know that the company is adding Guardian, a boundary-checking system, to the Rift SDK in the upcoming version 1.8.
Guardian is meant to alert the player in case he's wandering a little too close to walls or objects. RoadtoVR recently took Guardian out for a spin and came away impressed with a demo that showed the Guardian functionality integrated into game graphics. The site's Ben Lang played Dead & Buried for a bit before noticing that a piece of in-game barbed wire matched his physical boundaries.
Although Guardian is in most ways similar to Vive's Chaperone, Oculus' in-game integration could offer players yet another layer of immersion, since Chaperone just shows the same blue grid in every game. Mitchell also noted that developers will hear more about the new system at the Oculus Connect 3 conference in October.