COMMUNITY FEEDBACK
Gravelbelly - Posted: 11:52pm Jan 3, 2014
I must admit, I watched a video demo on youtube
about the Oculus Rift. Very impressive.... Except I also
was thinking, how do you find the correct keys on the
keyboard?
It’s a fair question from the OP. Most people who look
at the screen at the gameplay whilst pressing various
buttons don’t realise the they are actually using their
peripheral vision to locate their key and fingers. Because
they play games for hours, the brain maps what it sees
through your peripheral vision and can marry up where
their hands and fingers are with the keys on a keyboard
without consciously looking at the keys. Very few people
could do it without peripheral vision.
Those that think they could do it easily, put on blinkered
glasses or goggles so that they cannot see the keyboard
or their hands and see how difficult it would be for them.
Or place a cardboard box over the keyboard so that you
have the room to move your hands and fingers freely
over the keyboard, but without being able to see either. It
would be interesting to know how you got on.
The Oculus, although it is a great piece of technology,
which can only get better, creates tunnel vision and
totally blocks your peripheral vision.
time relative to where it was when you first took that
snapshot.
Of course, it would be a bit disconcerting to look down
at this ghostly keyboard, reach out and feel a key under
your finger without actually seeing your virtual hand on
the keyboard. Maybe they would need special gloves for
that :D
JalissCoetzee Posted: 5:34pm Jan 8, 2014
Is it too far to suggest some kind of keyboard “overlay”
for the Rift? Or maybe a floating point of reference
with the real-world so you don’t get lost (and thus have
a higher chance of orienting yourself to the existing
keyboard or whatever setup you’ve got)?
I like the voice control idea, although I’m not sure it’s the
only solution.
I’m also not sure as to whether the dogfighting will be
as complicated as you’re making it out to be. Granted,
we’re still in the early stages, but I’ve yet to see anything
that convinces me that SC will have a super-complex
dogfighting interface requirement. I don’t plan on
dogfighting much, but is Y/P/R, throttle, fire 1, fire 2, plus
everything else on a cockpit/joystick setup that difficult
to navigate with a Rift on?
BrewMike Posted: 7:31am Jan 8, 2014
GunFodder Posted: 6:01pm Jan 9, 2014
You bring up very good points about difficulties with using
a VR display with a complex flight simulator. I am hopeful
that the technology that added translation tracking to
the Rift, as demonstrated at CES, will be adapted to VR
gloves that track hand motions. With sufficient precision,
the gloves would allow you to interact with the virtual
cockpit for functions not mapped to your controllers.
Ideally, the gloves would also provide haptic feedback to
the player allowing him/her to ‘feel’ the cockpit surfaces.
I think that OculusVR is aware of this and their use of an
external camera in the CES demo opens up the possibility
they are also working on hand tracking.
Hey OP! I think we have some of the same concerns, and
I’m always a little surprised that this video isn’t posted
more often when these threads pop up. I’m on my phone,
so I can’t tell if the time stamp is working, but if you want
to get the the relevant part of the video, skip ahead to 3
minutes and 9 seconds:
Aidan Cass Posted: 2:29pm Jan 8, 2014
I was lucky enough to try out the Rift at Gamescom
and I had the same concern. I wonder if they use could
make use of the camera some how, so that when you
first turn it on, you could look down at your keyboard
and the OR would take a snapshot of it and estimate the
distance from the headset to the keyboard. Then during a
game, if you looked down to where your keyboard would
be, it could project a representation of the keyboard
at the appropriate distance, with an offset to the left
or the right depending on where your head was at the
http://youtu.be/IERHs7yYsWI?t=3m9s
This guy is using a kinect with very little modification to
allow you to see your hands/keyboard when you’d like.
His homebrew solution looks choppy now, but I have no
doubt that Oculus could get it working, especially with
the proposed stereoscopic cameras planned for the
consumer version.
On top of that, I see no reason why such a set-up couldn’t
allow you to adjust the opacity of the your hands/
peripherals. This would not only decrease the distraction
of having real world objects being overlaid on your virtual
world (um, “AVR?”), but also let you place your real
joystick where it appears to exist in your virtual cockpit.
Anyway, hope that helps!
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