Trinity Magnum: Another VR gun

To be honest, I saw the kickstarter, watched the video and thought 'great, another motion controller hampered by the fact that it relies on shoddy optical tracking (what happens when you want to aim the gun behind you?) and can only be used by one specific genre of game, which is rapidly becoming understood as less-than-ideal for VR.
Even if you ignore the fact that Oculus are going to be releasing their own motion controller, it seems like STEM or ControlVR will both do the same thing that this controller does, but without the FPS limitation...

I think it looks WAY too much like Playstation Hardware, in fact so much so that I am not sure they would actually make it to the market with it looking that way, unless they are doing some licensing from Sony...but as far as the optical tracking goes, as they say it is "optional" and probably more for a 2D monitor mode maybe? All I know is the Gun we are making uses no external tracking, and with the rift it is perfect! I played over and hour and a half non stop Team Fortress 2 last night:O) Just as soon as I fond a Guinea pig to video using out Motion Controller with the Oculus well be moving to get our kick-starter page finished. I have to say this is very difficult when your only one person:O/

~Bobby

I backed it, but I was concerned that the camera is BYO. Basically, they just send you the controller and you use whatever web-cam you have lying around, which may or may not be optimal for motion tracking. I bet lots of people will have a sub-par experience or encounter bugs due to the large range of cameras people could be using.

Indeed, but that was probably to keep the price down I am assuming, and I thought of the same thing, but I was thinking it would be easier to write an app with the Oculus SDK adding in support for LED extra tracking (besides the one on the rift), I have been fiddling with it in my spare time :O/

"mptp" wrote:
... can only be used by one specific genre of game, which is rapidly becoming understood as less-than-ideal for VR.

what makes you say that? you can do a ton of awesome things with such a controller - and you are not in the slightest limited to one genre (and I am curious if you mean FPS, because FPS are awesome on the Rift as long as you do not try a non VR one).

Yeah you don't HAVE to use them for FPS, I have used my VR gun for World of Warcraft a couple of times, and because it acts like a mouse/keyboard combo while is desktop mode it works great and is just as fast an accurate. I am sure theirs is probably similar in some way or another.

the hydra feels like having two guns - but it is being used for all kinds of virtual manipulations. just looking at all those cool use cases shows the potential :)

Does this work exactly like the ps move? (Technically)
If this is just a move controller then the price is bit much.

It's quite similar except the bigger form factor, wired for the Trinity Magnum instead of wireless for the PS Move and it adds two analog joysticks.

I also think it's a bit expensive when considering the price of a PS Move + Navigation Controller (one analog joystick). That's $19.99 + $13.70 = $33.69 vs $99.

Hopefully the support will be better since it doesn't depend on the awful Bluetooth stack on Windows.

to be fair this is not a mass produced article like Move, this is a kickstarter - the production costs for them are nothing like what Sony pays for a Move.
and they put software into the package too. plus move is great, but try to connect one to your PC and develop for it in Unity ... then you might find that alternatives are not a bad idea :)