Modern, high-end VR has its issues, but it’s difficult not to be impressed by its innovation and potential. Still, despite the intuitive nature of the Vive’s controllers and Oculus’ upcoming Touch gamepads, they’re still just pieces of plastic with buttons and triggers located on their surface.
For those unfamiliar with video games, but trying virtual reality for the first time, picking up a controller feels like a foreign activity, making an experience that should be intuitive, feel obtuse.
This is the VR input issue Microsoft is trying to solve with the company’s new experimental haptic tech, allowing VR users to interact with virtual reality with just their hands, instead of standard controller.
This further adds to the tangible sense of presence already created through virtual reality, allowing users to pick up and move virtual objects around with their actual hands. The tech is currently being tested by Microsoft’s team and interestingly enough, actually requires the use of the Kinect 2.0, as well as a secondary sensor attached to the hand.
“We have created a framework for repurposing passive haptics, called haptic retargeting, that leverages the dominance of vision when our senses conflict. With haptic retargeting, a single physical prop can provide passive haptics for multiple virtual objects,” says Microsoft’s team behind the project in a new video.
“We introduce three approaches for dynamically aligning physical and virtual objects: world manipulation, body manipulation and a hybrid technique which combines both world and body manipulation. Our study results indicate that all our haptic retargeting techniques improve the sense of presence when compared to typical wand-based 3D control of virtual objects.”
In the video, a member of Microsoft’s research team shows off how the company is using optics and “body warping” to make it feel like users are reaching for a different cube, when really it’s the same cube, located in an identical location.
