BLINDLY SEARCHING FOR EJECT
By Malleovic
“What I would like to see
is this Amazing Sim Setup
completely obsoleted and
replaced by the Oculus
Rift. With fully functional
cockpit
instrumentation
you WILL be sitting in the
cockpit, everything will
work, and all you still need
will be the controllers
(stick&rudder)”
- From The Forums
My biggest worry for the Rift is highlighted in that quote,
and I can’t figure out how they’re going to solve it without
additional peripherals for your hands and virtual buttons.
With the vast array of options and controls present in
a cockpit and thus mapped to obscure keys on your
keyboard (the availability of which may change from
ship to ship) what happens when the Rift prevents you
from seeing any of them in the real physical world and
you’re required to touch them with your equally unseen
real physical hands? The end result is that you will find
yourself fumbling blindly for them, losing precious
milliseconds in combat and potentially your very virtual
life.
I’m not saying that the Rift is not going to be spectacular.
We already know that it is. But beyond very basic
dogfighting with some kind of gamepad, control stick, or
the small number of buttons on your keyboard needed
for basic control and weapons, I just don’t think the Rift
will be practical. Not for anything even mildly complex,
for the same reason that controllers aren’t and for
the same reason that they don’t build modern military
aircraft with cockpits featuring a control stick, rudder
pedals, and ten buttons.
There are too many distinct and important tasks that
you will need to be able to do quickly without the extra
burden of having to hunt for a button by touch alone.
Now I know that I’m going to be inundated by hordes of
people claiming that they’ve “been playing games for
x many decades without looking at the keyboard” and I
want to applaud them in advance for their amazing skills
that mere mortals like I could never hope to match,
yadda yadda yadda. I’d like to submit that most of you
who fall into that category are referring to games
that require fewer than 15 different mapped keys,
10
games which might even be playable using a controller
exclusively. I sincerely hope that SC is not going to be one
of those games. Again, a controller + keyboard or HOTAS
+ keyboard setup would be fine for the same reason
that a mouse and keyboard would be fine (because you
need lots of buttons to control a spaceship in a SIM), but
I submit that the Oculus Rift will not be friendly to the
keyboard as a large array of important functions mapped
to keys which (braille reading gamers excused) will all
(Return, Space, Shift, et all excused) feel the same to the
touch.
I’m curious to know if anyone else has thought about this
and reached a similar conclusion. What do you think? Will
we all buy Oculus Rifts and just get used to it, developing
the skills necessary to move our unseen hands quickly
from a controller, stick, or the WASD keys to an essential
key as quickly as it’s needed? Or will we discover that
quick energy management, shield arrangement, weapon
switching, ammo switching, targeting, communications,
and even EJECT will all feel a lot harder to distinguish
in th e heat of battle when we can’t use any hand-eye
coordination to find them?