What is the ideal VR interface?
Until this point, I've been a gamepad man and a M+KB man for shooters. Now I have to wonder, what would be the most absolutely ideal form of interacting with the gameworld for the best sense of immersion?
Let's say the genre of game is an open world first person shooter. Like a combination of Fallout 3 and WoW, because why not?
Razer Hydra? Maybe for now, but I just have a hard time seeing these things as immersive, or likely to be widely supported by developers. They can tell you hand position and orientation, but that means 99% of your avatar's movement is using the game's canned animations. I think everybody having the exact same movements and universal lack of body language would end up being immersion breaking similarly to how much it stats to eat at me when I think about how everybody in Elder Scrolls games has the exact same body and musculature.
I can exclude mouse and keyboard and gamepads for similar reasons, so that really only leaves kinect.
If you can be fully scanned by the kinect, so your actual body, including physical dimensions, were represented in the game. Armour you equip could show up over your body, so, after the initial scan, the only thing the kinect would have to monitor would be the positions of your hands, feet, knees, elbows and head.
This is close, but what is missing is the ability to crouch, hop and go prone. Shooters need those too. Omni treadmill looks good but maybe version 2.0 could add those somehow, it's hard to imagine how.
If it were done, however, there's only one final piece: a gun prop. Since all shooters essentially use the same set of guns, you need to somehow be able to hold a pistol, shotgun, SMG, assault rifle and rocket launcher. Whatever prop was used would allow for in-game shooting to be completely determine by player skill, but would need a decent heft and weight in order to be satisfying to use. I think there should be a separate gun prop for each type of gun, and you switch guns in game by physically grabbing a different gun off of a table.
The kinect exists, as long as the kinect 2 has low enough latency, it just needs software. The guns could definitely be made with current technology and may be already for all I know. The only real missing piece is a treadmill that keeps you in position while letting you crawl around if the situation warrants it. And of course a game which actually used all of that. We'll be waiting a while for that I suppose, but then more should come with increasing frequency as the tech catches on.
Let's say the genre of game is an open world first person shooter. Like a combination of Fallout 3 and WoW, because why not?
Razer Hydra? Maybe for now, but I just have a hard time seeing these things as immersive, or likely to be widely supported by developers. They can tell you hand position and orientation, but that means 99% of your avatar's movement is using the game's canned animations. I think everybody having the exact same movements and universal lack of body language would end up being immersion breaking similarly to how much it stats to eat at me when I think about how everybody in Elder Scrolls games has the exact same body and musculature.
I can exclude mouse and keyboard and gamepads for similar reasons, so that really only leaves kinect.
If you can be fully scanned by the kinect, so your actual body, including physical dimensions, were represented in the game. Armour you equip could show up over your body, so, after the initial scan, the only thing the kinect would have to monitor would be the positions of your hands, feet, knees, elbows and head.
This is close, but what is missing is the ability to crouch, hop and go prone. Shooters need those too. Omni treadmill looks good but maybe version 2.0 could add those somehow, it's hard to imagine how.
If it were done, however, there's only one final piece: a gun prop. Since all shooters essentially use the same set of guns, you need to somehow be able to hold a pistol, shotgun, SMG, assault rifle and rocket launcher. Whatever prop was used would allow for in-game shooting to be completely determine by player skill, but would need a decent heft and weight in order to be satisfying to use. I think there should be a separate gun prop for each type of gun, and you switch guns in game by physically grabbing a different gun off of a table.
The kinect exists, as long as the kinect 2 has low enough latency, it just needs software. The guns could definitely be made with current technology and may be already for all I know. The only real missing piece is a treadmill that keeps you in position while letting you crawl around if the situation warrants it. And of course a game which actually used all of that. We'll be waiting a while for that I suppose, but then more should come with increasing frequency as the tech catches on.
