vr controllers

Meta Reveals Touch Pro Controllers for Quest Pro, Also Compatible with Quest 2

October 11, 2022 From roadtovr

Meta’s new Quest Pro headset includes Touch Pro controllers which come with a bevy upgrades, and they’ll work with Quest 2 as well.

Meta says that Quest Pro and Quest 2 will co-exist as high-end and entry-level headset lines, and there’s perhaps no clearer evidence of this than that the company has taken the time to make its new Touch Pro controllers compatible with both headsets.

Key Quest Pro Coverage:

Quest Pro Revealed – Full Specs, Price, & Release Date

Quest Pro Hands-on – The Dawn of the Mixed Reality Headset Era

Quest Pro Technical Analysis – What’s Promising & What’s Not

Touch Pro Controllers Revealed – Also Compatible with Quest 2

Touch Pro controllers do away with the tracking ring that’s been present on every Touch controller to date. This time around they use three on-board cameras to perform their own inside-out tracking.

Not only does this make the controllers more compact, it also means they don’t need to have line-of-sight to the headset in order to maintain tracking. That means they should work great even when your hands are above your head, at your side, or behind you. And I’m sure someone will try attaching them to their feet.

Touch Pro controllers also include two new capabilities not seen in those prior: a pressure sensor for pinching and a pressure sensitive stylus tip.

The pinch sensor is on the controller’s thumb rest, allowing users to squeeze the controller between their index finger and thumb for a natural pinching gesture. Thanks to its pressure sensitivity this makes for a somewhat more nuanced input compared to the controller’s buttons and triggers.

The stylus tip, which is included with the controllers but can be freely detached, allows the controller to be used like a bulbous white-board marker with pressure sensitivity so it can understand how hard you’re pushing as you draw against physical surfaces.

Touch Pro also includes improved haptics with more powerful and precise haptic engines inside, and they’re rechargeable.

But Quest 2 users should fear not… all of the Touch Pro improvements are within reach. Meta says Touch Pro controllers are fully compatible with Quest 2 and the company plans to sell them as a standalone accessory priced at $300 for a pair. A firm release date for Touch Pro controllers hasn’t been set yet, but the company says they’ll be available for standalone purchase “later this year.”

Latest Manus VR Gloves Promise New Levels of Finger Tracking Accuracy

March 25, 2022 From roadtovr

At GDC 2022 this week, VR glove creator Manus revealed its new Quantum Metagloves which the company says delivers significantly more accurate finger tracking than its prior solutions. Though priced for enterprise use, the company says it one day hopes to deliver the tech to consumers.

Manus has been building motion gloves for use in real-time VR and motion capture for years now, with prior offerings being based on IMU and flex-sensor tracking.

The company’s latest product, the Quantum Metagloves, moves to a new magnetic tracking approach which purportedly offers significantly more accurate finger tracking, especially when it comes to self-contact (ie: fingers touching other fingers or the palm of the hand).

Revealed at GDC 2022 for the first time, Manus showed off a demo of the Quantum Metagloves using a realistic real-time hand model that mirrored the wearer’s finger movements. Though the gloves are designed to work in conjunction with 6DOF tracking (via a SteamVR tracker or other motion tracking tech), the GDC demo didn’t employ 6DOF (which is why the visualization of the arm rotates in place). The latency reflected in this setup is also purportedly not representative of the actual tracking latency.

The Quantum Metagloves have a magnetic base positioned on the back of the palm while each finger has a module on the tip that is sensed within the magnetic field. Manus says this means the gloves can detect absolute finger length and width (once calibrated), which enables more accurate hand-tracking when combined with an underlying skeletal model of the hand that is scaled dynamically to the user.

In the video I asked the demonstrator to make a handful of different poses. Indeed, finger-to-finger and finger-to-palm contact looked impressive with no obvious clipping or stuttering. The company told me the demo wasn’t specially programmed to make clipping impossible and that the behavior was purely thanks to the positional data of the sensors which was described as “very clean” compared to alternative approaches to finger tracking.

Manus says the Quantum Metagloves are unique in this way, as other finger tracking technology tends to break down in these sorts of close-contact and self-contact scenarios, especially when both hands are near or touching each other. Even expensive optical tracking systems (with markers on the tips of each finger) can be foiled easily by self-occlusion or one hand occluding the other. Similarly, purely IMU-based finger tracking is prone to drift and requires regular recalibration.

But magnetic tracking is by no means perfect. In other magnetic tracking systems we’ve seen challenges with latency and electromagnetic interference.

Manus admitted that holding metallic or electronic items could throw off the tracking, but says it worked hard to ensure the gloves don’t interfere with each other; up to eight gloves can be active near each other without interference issues, the company says.

While self-contact looked generally quite good with the Quantum Metagloves, other poses didn’t fare quite as well—like a completely clenched first. The demonstrator suggested this would be improved easily with a more robust calibration process that included similar poses; whereas they say the calibration used for the demo at GDC was designed to be quick and easy for purposes of the show.

While the finger tracking did look great in many of the demos I saw, some of the other demo gloves on display showed much less accuracy. This was chalked up to “calibration,” though a big question for such systems is how much said calibration drifts over time and whether the periods between recalibration are practical for a given use-case.

In any case, use-cases will be deeply constrained by price; Manus says a pair of the Quantum Metagloves will cost $9,000, with pre-orders opening in April and shipments expected by the end of Q3. The company says it also plans to launch a haptic version of the Quantum Metagloves which will include per-finger haptics to enhance immersion in VR.

Manus maintains that it would like to bring its gloves to consumers one day, but says the number of custom parts and manufacturing makes it difficult to get the price down to a reasonable level.

HTC Announces Wrist Tracker for Vive Focus 3, Releasing in Early 2022 for $129

January 5, 2022 From roadtovr

HTC unveiled a new VR tracker device at CES 2022 today, this time targeting its $1,300 enterprise-focused standalone headset, Vive Focus 3. It’s slated to go on sale sometime early this year, starting at $129.

Unlike its SteamVR-compatible Vive Tracker, the new Vive Wrist Tracker is a wrist-worn device which hooks into Vive Focus 3’s inside-out tracking system. It does this essentially the same way the headset’s controllers are tracked in room-scale space, i.e. through infrared LEDs that are tracked optically through the headset’s onboard camera sensors.

HTC says in the announcement that the tracker allows users to either strap it to their wrist for what the company calls “advanced hand tracking” in addition to using controllers, or to objects like gun controllers, Ping-Pong paddles, or tools.

Below you can see a Nerf gun has been rigged up with Vive Wrist Tracker, making for a 6DOF-tracked virtual weapon:

The company says Vive Wrist Tracker is 85% smaller than Vive Focus 3’s controller, and 50% lighter at 63g. It boasts up to four hours of constant use, charged via USB-C. HTC says it includes a simple one-button pairing feature for wireless connection, and also features a removable strap for easy cleaning.

As for its more accurate hand tracking, this is what the company says in Vive Wrist Tracker’s announcement:

“When user wears the tracker on the wrist, we can predict the tracker’s motion trajectories even when the tracker is out of camera’s view in a while by using high-frequency IMU data and an advanced kinematic model. With this technology, we can predict their hand position when the hands leave the tracking camera view.”

Road to VR skipped the physical bit of CES 2022 this year, however we’re very interested to see the wrist tracker in action to see if it makes a material difference in terms of hand tracking.

Likely its biggest appeal is the ability to track objects, giving location-based entertainment venues and enterprise users the ability to avoid the typical mixing and matching of hardware ecosystems, such as OptiTrack or SteamVR base stations. To boot, HTC says its releasing CAD files so prospective owners can build custom docking solutions or harnesses around the tracker.

HTC is initially launching Vive Wrist Tracker in the US starting early 2022, priced at $129/€129/£119. Although they haven’t said as much, that pricing means it will very likely roll out Vive Wrist Tracker to the UK and EU at a later date.

In addition to Vive Wrist Tracker, HTC unveiled a few other Vive Focus 3 accessories, including a new charging travel case and a multi-battery charging dock. It’s not clear when either of those will go on sale, or for what price. We’ll be keeping an eye on the Vive accessories product page in the meantime.