Virtual reality is already a cool technology, but to make it truly immersive, you don’t just need your head in another world, you need your hands there too. Enter Oculus Touch, the company’s brand new VR input devices that make something called “hand presence” possible in VR. But getting to this design was a process of more than two years of smart thinking and scores of prototypes.
The very first thing that Oculus needed to bring your hands into VR was to have a perfectly tracked solution, just like how a headset has embedded LEDs that a sensor reads and position something in space. They knew that the hand controller needed to do the same thing. The early investigations looked at how much space they could provide to embed some infrared LEDs and let the computer read these. The question then became how it would fit in your hand. Would something fit onto your hand or would it be something that you could hold like a flight stick?
The main question became whether you would hold it or wear it. While wearing something has the obvious benefit of being able to just open your hand and it’s there, getting them on and off left a lot to be desired from a user experience perspective. Meanwhile, the decision of what to put on the area on the face of the controller was also being discussed. Would it be thumbsticks or a D-pad like on a regular game controller?
After much exploration, Oculus designed a small ring with all the embedded tracking on it, and a trigger that would eventually get a secondary trigger. On the face, the thumbstick is more to the inside and the buttons are to the outside, leading to what’s known as the half moon prototype. This was first brought to the E3 video game show in the summer of 2015, and it was the first time that anybody outside of Oculus saw this device.
The culmination of two and a half years of design thinking eventually led to the finished product. The tracking is hidden inside a ring of infrared translucent plastic and the finished triggers and input buttons, and the thumbsticks all register when your thumb is on them. Through various permutations of having your thumb on something or resting away from it, Oculus enables you to give thumbs up, grip things, and perform other discreet actions that help you translate the thing you’re trying to communicate into a VR surrounding.
In conclusion, Oculus Touch is the result of a long and deliberate design process that took into consideration how to track hands and how to make them as comfortable as possible to wear while delivering the right kind of tactile feedback. The end result is a device that provides hand presence and helps to make virtual reality even more immersive.