One usecase though for him is to use your hands in VR. Hand tracking already has that covered though it's not yet perfect. But much more natural than using gloves.
Being able to feel things in VR would be a big thing though. Especially if the gloves can also push back. So you could push against a wall and feel it. But in order for that to happen they'd have to be attached to something, not sure how that would work.
But it does look like he's got feedback of hand held objects working which would be interesting too.
Here's a video where they put a glove together and talk about its features and also show a bit of the grasping feedback feature: https://youtu.be/laZOSSEGqq8
> But in order for that to happen they'd have to be attached to something,
Only if you care about getting momentum right. If you push against a wall, feel pressure on your hand, and your viewpoint moves away from the wall, then (apart from the motion sickness) that's a pretty good wall simulator.
> > But in order for that to happen they'd have to be attached to something,
> Only if you care about getting momentum right. If you push against a wall, feel pressure on your hand, and your viewpoint moves away from the wall, then (apart from the motion sickness) that's a pretty good wall simulator.
In theory, you could get a bit more resistance than just the tactile feeling of pressure by bracing against the user's body in some fashion, but mechanically that might be hard to accomplish without what amounts to a wearable robot arm automagically interposing surfaces wherever you are supposed to feel them (and of course it would fail fairly dramatically as soon as you tried to lean against a wall or a tree).
Hand tracking is more natural feeling when it works. But requires your hands to be in view of the sensors and not be occluded by each other or different objects. That adds an awkwardness to the interaction which limits the possibilities.
Only Prototype 4 is going to have force feedback.[1] Everything else is just some string pots for input. That's not a good way to do sensing, but if you have something that can pull on the strings, offers a way to apply forces to the hand.
It looks like the plan is to mount five R/C servos on the wrist cuff.
This is one of those projects for which you'd like OpenServo.[2] That was an old project to re-controller hobby R/C servos so that you could get force feedback and position feedback for robot use. It worked, but never became popular.
Very cool project, though not yet at the point where non-MIT untermensch like me can build a replica easily. I’m eagerly awaiting prebuilt controller+force feedback kits that we can attach to our own gloves (instead of getting them from retractable badge holders).
This looks like a plausible build for an eager hobbyist. PhD not required. There was an open source AR headset released a few years back and my company put one together with a smattering of off-the-shelf parts and a consumer-grade 3d printer in a few weeks with just a few regular devs with undergrad degrees. The parts list for this device is nothing you can't find on amazon/aliexpress/digikey and it says you can use an Ender or any other FDM printer (no mention of filament, but I'm guessing that means PLA is ok).
Really? Have you been living in a cave for the past two plus decades? 3D printing, arduino, opencores, etc have been big news and are all open source hardware.
That was actually staged. They built the walls as a floating frame that could be moved around him. It wasn't until a decade later that we started seeing prototypes for roomscale treadmills like these:
Is it hard to make inputs capacitive/force sensing based and feedback flexion based? Are finger travels necessary or better?
I’m picturing a very Apple mouse like device with dimples for fingers, covered in a rubber like material, that changes its stiffness using some internal solenoid or piezo mechanisms.
I wonder how miniaturized and cheap something like this could be given full scale production. Would the spools always need to be that big or it more a feature of being 3d printed?
The first real 'killer app' game (Half Life Alyx) released coincident to GPU prices going nuts. People got interested in VR... then couldn't upgrade their PCs to run it.
Alyx is wonderful but it is not the Killer App for VR; Beat Saber is.
Beat saber’s popularity is absurd. Someone here on HN once mentioned it’s like if the most popular app on the App Store, ahead of WhatsApp, YouTube and all such free apps, was a game that costs 20 bucks.
Yeah, that was going to be my major driver for getting a VR rig. I used to do Arnis/Escrima (stick fighting martial art), so this appeals to me greatly.
Then Facebook bought them. So, all plans for getting a VR rig have been permanently shelved. :(
Ah i understand. You still have the option of buying a non-Facebook rig such as a VIVE or Index and not buying any DLC (there is an extremely active modding scene). If you really don’t want to give Facebook any money, nobody will judge you for acquiring the game itself via other means, either.
As a fellow player, it’s worth it. I have TWO VR rigs and both of them only have beat saber on them.
no but you need a GPU, and your average person with a work lap-top can't run it and probably postponed buying a desktop computer, if they ever considered it.
I don't know, I love VR and I don't think it's dead but shared video watching is not something I'd be remotely interested in.
Meeting people in VR would be nice but I think it's nicer to do something more interactive than watching video. The same way I'd never want to go on a date to the cinema. It's not really a social experience.
But of course interests vary. Maybe it's a big thing, I'm all for it if it can drive VR more mainstream:)
> The same way I'd never want to go on a date to the cinema.
While I agree with you on this point, there’s a reason it’s half of the most cliche date night of all time (aka “dinner and a movie”), so readily dismissing that because our tastes defer from the norm seems misguided.
Not everything is built for you in particular. That doesn't mean it's irrelevant. I don't care who you are, you aren't representative of the aggregate.
