Forum Discussion
Is oculus having difficulty thinking of an input device?
I thought oculus would have had it all figured out, but the more i read this section of the thread the more i doubt that oculus haven't figured out an input device. This is what you do, you use the b...
"mptp" wrote:
The only ideal input is this: a skeletal hand tracker that has sub-millimetre accuracy, very good latency, and 100% reliability. This is what Oculus have said their input device needs to be. There are a two (very big) problems with this goal however:
- If both hands are being tracked, this means that you can't hold onto a controller (or if you do, then that hand can no longer be used for interaction). The main problem with this is locomotion: how do you move around in the game if both your hands are unavailable to move joysticks / press buttons? It's something that's talked about a great deal so I won't mention it any further.
- At the moment, all hand-tracking technologies are either too expensive to be bundled with every Rift (e.g. IMU-based tracking) or too unreliable/inaccurate (e.g. optical tracking). This basically means Oculus have to come up with a completely novel hand-tracking solution
You make some good points but i really don't think these 2 problems you mentioned should be so hard to overcome:
- If the tracking is good enough you don't really need buttons and thumbsticks, these could be simulated by doing specific movements with your hands and fingers (we simply need to find combinations that are easy to do on purpose but hard to make by mistake).
- For me it's clear that the best technology in this case is optical tracking + IMU for general hand position (which we already have for the hmd) + mechanical tracking for the fingers. These 3 technologies combined can be cheap, accurate and reliable at the same time. As and added bonus you could even have haptic feedback or "finger movement blocking".