Pulse #2, Feb 2 2014 | Page 13

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! 11