Oculus Touch: Touching is Believing

We've been believers in virtual reality (VR) since we tried an early version {Eve: Valkyrie} with Oculus Rift DK1 a few years back. It truly opened our eyes to the possibilities. It was difficult not to be swayed by it. It's natural to remains sceptical though. Will VR truly revolutionise the medium as first promised 20 odd years ago? That's for the market to decide - for the players to weigh in on once the headsets have actually launched and there are games out there built from the ground up for VR. There is a lot of promise, but ultimately the software will decide whether it's a hit or not.

But VR is not just about the headset (even if the leaps made with the consumer model of Oculus Rift are noticeable). When Valve and HTC unveiled Vive, the Lighthouse boxes and the SteamVR controllers it was addressing a greater vision - one in which players would move around inside a VR space with the movement of your limbs faithfully mirrored in VR. It's a bold promise and one that Oculus VR makes with the aid of their Oculus Touch motion controllers. Much different from the SteamVR controllers, these odd input devices neatly lets you grab and touch objects inside of the VR space. They truly feel like the next step of VR gaming.

While we've only sampled Oculus Touch (and HTC Vive for that matter) inside of very controlled, specially designed rooms (no doubt to ensure as few issues with tracking as possible) it certainly presents us with that next step of immersion. It really puts us inside the virtual space.

The demo for Oculus Touch was a two-player experience where you got to interact with a bunch of objects and devices on a table. There were simple things like balls and guns and table tennis racquets (we actually got a little rally going between the two of us - testament to how natural it felt and how well the physics simulation worked). The way the physical objects behave to your "touch" was amazing. The demo didn't feature full tracking of all your fingers (the first thing we naturally tried was giving our friend in the other room the middle finger - who would have guessed). But we could open our hand, grasp at things, and point with our index finger. Compare this to using the SteamVR controller to interact with balloons and you'll soon realise that for this type of physical interaction the Oculus Touch is a far more delicate and immersive tool.

The Oculus Touch demo featured many things to play with - there was a shrink ray gun that allowed you to shrink your friend to a size perfect for placing him or her in the toy tank on the table (a weird coincidence was that Valve's Secret Shop demo for Vive played around with the same sort of shrink mechanic), but most impressive was the slingshot. Grabbing it one hand then pulling back with the other, or even doing some co-op with the other person to line it up, charge up and then release. It stands to reason that there was some element of auto-assist there, but in the end it felt incredibly true to nature.

Inside the Oculus Touch demo room we were standing on a square mat of about one square metre and told not to move beyond it. Clearly Oculus is not aiming for the same sort of virtual space simulation as Vive with the Lighthouse stations, but for most gaming purposes this space is enough and allows for some limited movement.

The Oculus Touch controller looks weird compared to anything else you've used to play games with. Perhaps its best compared to the Wii nunchuck, but with a ring of sensor attached to track your fingers. It's a clever device and we can see how this will fit perfectly with certain VR experiences, especially games like {Pollen} (from Mindfield Games), where much of the attraction comes from tactile interaction with objects on the deserted space station. Simulating sports like bowling and tennis are givens, and should leave any memories of {Wii Sports} in the dust.

Oculus Touch is in many ways walking a fine line. If it's not accurate enough in tracking hand gestures it will be a complete turn off as players fail at picking up objects and examining them. On the other hand if it's as accurate and robust as experienced in this brief demo, then well, it opens up a whole new level of immersion in the VR field.