Week 1 – Hands-on with VR/AR
I’ve been lucky enough to have owned an Oculus Quest 2, now known as the Meta Quest 2, for around one and a half years now and in that time I’ve had a chance to sample the games on offer as well as have a go at development.
With my Oculus headset on and opening up a few of my favourites – some of them with frantic movement others with more deliberate controls requiring finesse.
Beat Saber is a frantic game that requires timing and execution and having to swing light sabers really calls to the nerd in me. I’m not an expert by any means, but the video on the right is of me playing one of my favourite songs, 100 Dollar Bills.
The more deliberate games require thought or other modes of control and one game I recently discovered is Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes which is about diffusing bombs where only you can see the bomb, and everyone else has the instructions to how to diffuse it.
This makes it a fun game having to not only explain what you are seeing but having to then convey that to your team mates and holding a bomb in your hands whilst diffusing it is a real interesting style game.
There are quite a few industry sectors that could benefit the technology that is available in VR headsets beyond the obvious games that I mentioned above. Any dangerous training could be simulated, the idea of a bomb diffusing game could easily be extended into training for a bomb disposal unit or military IED’s. The ability to perform tasks that allow you to visualize things without physically creating them, such as being able to see your building design or vehicle in the virtual world before spending time and money to physically build them.
The features of the control systems available on the Oculus Quest are either using the provided controllers that are quite accurate utilising the cameras on the front of the unit.
The other way of interacting with the Quest is by hand-tracking which has only been available a short while, but they work quite well for something that is just monitoring your hands positioning.
There are pro’s and con’s for both control systems and some of those features are present in both ways of interaction with the Oculus Quest. Below are my findings of both the positives and negatives of each controller type.
Controllers
Positives
- More consistent tracking of location of hands
- Still works in dark environments
- Buttons and triggers allow different interactions
Negatives
- Requires batteries
- Finger location is simulated
Hand-Tracking
Positives
- No batteries
- Better tracking of actual hands and finger positioning
- Can handle complex hand gestures and articulation
Negatives
- Hand tracking fails when close together
- Requires well-lit areas to keep tracking consistent
- Limited interaction options
There are a great variety of games and systems that will take advantage of both systems and I can see in the future a hybrid of the controller and hand-tracking system being utilised, probably with haptic feedback embedded in gloves allowing the best of both worlds. But we have a great future ahead of us in what we are heading towards, maybe even an OASIS style virtual world.
References
- Horwitz, J. 2019, Hands-on: Oculus Quest hand tracking looks cool, and sometimes even works, Venture Beat, https://venturebeat.com/2019/12/17/hands-on-oculus-quest-hand-tracking-looks-cool-and-sometimes-even-works/, retrieved 7th March 2022.
- Beat Games, Beat Saber, https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2448060205267927/, retrieved 7th March 2022.
- Steel Crate Games, Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/2010043642376517/, retrieved 7th March 2022.