Reach out and touch fake: Hand tracking in VR? How about your own, personal, haptics?

Oculus may be bringing hand tracking to the Quest, its standalone virtual reality (VR) platform, but haptic feedback is really where things are at. While VR visuals continue to improve, more analog experiences, such as prodding something in the virtual space, have lagged. The Register had a play with one of the latest …

[Ben Rosenthal]

Manus....The hands of fate.....

[Alister]

from the land of clogs

Wot, Cumbria?

[phuzz]

"The ultimate goal," said Yeter, is "that you cannot move your finger anymore."

Well, that'll be just fabulous when the software crashes, and you can't extricate your hands to reset it.

Still, I'm sure the p0rn industry has plans...

[dubno]

Shout out for the Depeche Mode reference

[Starace]

Limitations

If you really want proper accurate hand and finger tracking you need quite a few IMUs (16 or 17) to capture the full possible range of motion. You can get away with smaller numbers if you're prepared to compromise on what you can capture (ie much more than fingers flex).

Of course this only truly matters if you're doing something that needs that level of fidelity.

The other issue is usually calibration, especially if you're trying to correlate with touching something physical. Then you need to measure that hands at some point to get the skeleton right and make sure you've got a decent hand waving calibration phase. With haptics instead you probably don't care quite so much.

These things seem quite expensive for what they are compared to other gloves with similar motion capture so what you're really paying for is the haptics. For the money I hope they've got the durability finally sorted!

These things are great when they work but we're still at the stage where there are lots of entrants in the market and none of them are perfect yet. Hopefully there's enough market demand to get this to settle out.

[The Indomitable Gall]

Oculus Quest hand tracking

" Unlike the wizardry used by the HoloLens 2 to calculate the position of the user's extremities, the Quest will employ its monochrome cameras and "AI magic".

Good luck with that – the Quest is hardly the processing powerhouse. "

Processing not required, allegedly. Oculus seem to be saying (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2zLneGGbk8) that this is all done on the devices DSP hardware, and that the DSP hardware was specced up deliberately to leave enough capacity after implementing the basic inside-out tracking for later hand-tracking to be included.

I haven't looked into developer specs in any depth (if I play with VR dev, it's always with the dev kits in Unity or UE) but I'm not aware of any API to allow developers to access the DSP for custom functionality, so I don't believe it's going to have any real impact on device performance. Yes, there's reportedly currently noticeable latency in it, but that's likely to be down to the DSP itself.

[A Nonny Moose]

How much?!

€5000?! You'll not see penny one from me you slags!

Still, interesting concept, here's hoping for a more reasonably priced consumer version in the next decade.

[Sherrie Ludwig]

well, clunky now, but as proof-of-concept, a good start. Rather like the shoebox sized cell phone of yore, perhaps eventually sensors imprinted on something like a pair of "rubber" gloves.