Earlier this year Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a new form of input being developed over at Oculus: hand tracking gloves. We only saw them through a picture at first, but now a video has surfaced online showing them in action.
An unlisted Oculus video posted last week, unearthed by Reddit, shows the gloves in action. Though there’s no text to accompany the clip it looks like the back of the hand is lined with markers. That might mean the kit uses an outside-in tracking system, perhaps with the very same cameras that track the Rift and Touch controllers. Indeed Zuckerberg’s tease from a few months ago seemed to showcase sensors tracking the gloves. That’s complete speculation on our part, though, and the real focus of the video is the accuracy of the gloves, which allow for startlingly lifelike finger tracking.
Given the timing of the video, we wonder if Oculus will be showcasing these gloves at SIGGRAPH when it gets underway next week.
You shouldn’t expect an actual product to come out of this anytime soon; Oculus won’t be releasing any new hardware in 2017 and the Touch controllers are still the primary form of input for its VR experiences having only released late last year. It’s more than likely that this is still an R&D project that’s not even confirmed for a consumer release. We’d love to know if these gloves have any kind of haptic feedback to react to actions like pressing buttons.
We’d love to know if these gloves have any kind of haptic feedback to react to actions like pressing buttons. Accurate finger tracking is another important step towards fully VR immersion, but actually replicating the feel and resistance of surfaces and objects in VR is another challenge entirely.
It’s exciting to think, though, about what might be possible with a combination of glove and Touch controller, giving us unprecedented hand-presence in the virtual world. That said the finger tracking on Valve’s new Knuckles controllers for SteamVR offers a similar sort of experience already.
via Mint VR