New HTC Vive VR Controller Prototype Showcased At Valve Steam Dev Days
Innovation in the VR industry happens quickly. Just days ago, Oculus opened pre-orders for the Oculus Touch controllers, which bring the Rift platform to parity with the Vive system. Oculus’s approach to its motion controllers could be considered a step beyond what the Vive’s wand controllers offer. Touch includes sensors that track your finger placement, which introduces hand gesture to developers as another action.
We had just started to consider the idea that Touch could be the cause of exclusive titles for Oculus, simply because the Vive’s controllers aren’t capable of tracking fingers, but today it seems there's a new prototype controller for the Vive. Valve is currently hosting the Steam Dev Days developer conference, and even though the event is closed to the press, some of the attendees are spilling the beans on Twitter.
According to Buffalo.Vision, the developer behind Irrational Exuberance, the new Vive controller gives you the freedom to let go of the controller so you can pick things up naturally. We’re unsure if that means you can pick up real objects, or if that means that controller includes finger tracking to grab VR objects, but we’d guess it's the latter.
We expect to hear more about the controller sooner than later. Cloudhead Games sent out a Tweet confirming that Valve is showcasing the new controllers with a “special demo of Call of the Starseed,” so it’s only a matter of time before someone shares the details.
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Kevin Carbotte is a contributing writer for Tom's Hardware who primarily covers VR and AR hardware. He has been writing for us for more than four years.
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wifiburger VR controllers highlights, oh yeah reminds me of media coverage of the wii mote and we all know how garbage those games turned out to beReply
no difference here, pass and pass..... -
kcarbotte Reply18721990 said:VR controllers highlights, oh yeah reminds me of media coverage of the wii mote and we all know how garbage those games turned out to be
no difference here, pass and pass.....
There are tremendous differences between Vive controllers and Wii motes. The most obvious being over a decade of innovation between the two. -
Blitz Hacker Yet they still have the consumer appeal and proportional cost of the Nintendo Powerglove.Reply -
kcarbotte Reply18722405 said:Yet they still have the consumer appeal and proportional cost of the Nintendo Powerglove.
because people are equating them as not better than Wii motes without ever bothering to try it out.
VR will have a slow adoption curve. Guess what else had slow consumer adoption and was very costly, to begin with: TVs, game consoles, personal computers, laptops, the internet, smartphones, and practically every other new technology that has ever been introduced.
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Kimonajane Is this a piece about Vive or Oculus? The author starts out diving right into Oculus news. Tom's is in love with Facebook/Oculus junk.Reply -
kcarbotte Reply18723575 said:Is this a piece about Vive or Oculus? The author starts out diving right into Oculus news. Tom's is in love with Facebook/Oculus junk.
Not sure how you can equate that.
Our top pick for VR system is the Vive and we've put up far more coverage about Vive games than Rift games.
Rift was brought up because the Touch controllers were big news just a week ago. Now Valve is firing back. It's all relevant. -
coolitic Reply18721990 said:VR controllers highlights, oh yeah reminds me of media coverage of the wii mote and we all know how garbage those games turned out to be
no difference here, pass and pass.....
And here I am actually liking the wii remote.
Last I checked the wii mote was great in many games, though there were obviously some pretty poor implementations. -
SockPuppet The Touch controllers DO NOT have any sort of finger tracking. None. Zip.Reply
The trigger and the thumbstick are capacitive and know when you have your finger on the button or not. That's it. It's NOT "tracking" anything.