Is oculus having difficulty thinking of an input device?

"PatimPatam" wrote:
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".

Yeah that's true - perfect skeletal hand-tracking is basically an infinitude of buttons and joysticks. But the reason you still need a seperate locomotion controller is you need to have the ability to use both your hands while you move around. If one of the hands is constantly being used for locomotion, then you might as well just give the player a nunchuk or something. (Obviously a hand is better than a nunchuk since you can 'dismiss' and 'recall' the controller at will, but you get my point?)

You don't need mechanical tracking at all - if you know the hand's root position (through optical/magnetic tracking), and you have IMUs on each finger bone, then you can apply a hand-model to get a skeleton reconstruction. This works because the finger IMUs are only doing rotation detection, not acceleration. Unfortunately, it's not a cheap solution at all - an optically tracked data glove with 6 IMUs in it (which is the bare minimum, ideally you'd want 15, but 11 would do a very good job) would cost consumers anywhere between $50 and $100 to buy, and you need two of them. Even using a mechanical solution like Dexmo wouldn't get the cost much lower (and mechanical data gloves have their own problems)
I remember reading that the 'sweet spot' for consumer electronics was around $200-$300. That is, if you go much higher than that, you start losing big chunks of adopters. It's looking like CV1 is going to perhaps just scrape in at around $300 - adding $50-$100 to the price for data gloves is a heavy decision to make.