Forum Discussion
Is there a standard being created for VR Input Devices?
First of all, bear with me that, while I am, and have been a software programmer for the last 20+ years, I have very little experience at game development or character animation.
That being said, I've seen in this last year or so, a whole lot of people embark on this exciting journey towards VR, either by developing demos and games, or by creating peripherals , such as hand devices (Hydra, STEM) , motion capture systems (Yei), walking/running treadmills (Virtuix Omni, Cyberith Virtualizer).
My question is, has any standard been created or proposed towards integrating all these input systems with character animation?
I imagine it must be awfully disappointing for a company to develop this perfect high precision capture device, and see none of it's input data be handled correctly by some games. The same can be said about the nightmare that it could be of a game developer to have to account for all the different type of peripherals and capture schemes of various natures and precisions.
I can imagine all these interactions between input devices and character animations becoming more and more complex, as we start seeing higher fidelity tracking, and finer motion, such as fingers, eyes, facial expressions, etc...
Is there any standard being developed or proposed anywhere, by anyone? If not, I sincerely think someone should. Maybe OculusVR could spearhead this movement.
That being said, I've seen in this last year or so, a whole lot of people embark on this exciting journey towards VR, either by developing demos and games, or by creating peripherals , such as hand devices (Hydra, STEM) , motion capture systems (Yei), walking/running treadmills (Virtuix Omni, Cyberith Virtualizer).
My question is, has any standard been created or proposed towards integrating all these input systems with character animation?
I imagine it must be awfully disappointing for a company to develop this perfect high precision capture device, and see none of it's input data be handled correctly by some games. The same can be said about the nightmare that it could be of a game developer to have to account for all the different type of peripherals and capture schemes of various natures and precisions.
I can imagine all these interactions between input devices and character animations becoming more and more complex, as we start seeing higher fidelity tracking, and finer motion, such as fingers, eyes, facial expressions, etc...
Is there any standard being developed or proposed anywhere, by anyone? If not, I sincerely think someone should. Maybe OculusVR could spearhead this movement.
3 Replies
- Well if we had the ideal mmo like in Earnest Cline's Imaginary MMO the Oasis from Ready Player One then all the Devices would probably be made to fit the inputs and outputs already in the system. However that coming to fruition may be a good ways off. Unity is probably the closest I can think of. With Unity you can even make complex vr peripherals with arduino using the uniduino plugin. Yes it is still far from ideal because people will be playing a variety of experiences that probably aren't fine tuned to all your devices but its a step in the right direction none the less. Feel free to join us this Saturday on our Google hangout to chat about arduino based input devices.
- VRPN (Virtual Reality Peripheral Network) is pretty much the standard for tracking in the academic and research community. The library supports about 50 trackers. In many cases you can change to different tracking hardware without having to change the application source code.
http://www.cs.unc.edu/Research/vrpn/ - When in doubt, give USB.org's HID standards a read. They were surprisingly forward thinking. Too bad no-one really makes use of all that's already in the standards.
