The Step Needed to Make Virtual Reality More Real
Eyefluence is building eye-tracking technology that it believes will be good enough to let you do anything in virtual reality, from hitting subterranean mammals to navigating different menus and apps, all by simply looking around.
“People are now really starting to see that interaction in VR is far from a solved problem,” says Evan Suma, a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies. “This is something the VR research community has been looking at for a number of years, going back decades.”
Oculus and HTC have some solutions. Oculus plans to ship its headset with a wireless Xbox One controller, and to release a more immersive set of button-bedecked, hand-held trackable controllers called Oculus Touch later in the year. HTC’s headset will come with a pair of wand-shaped controllers. But such controllers are not always ideal because they don’t match the ways you use your body when, say, exploring the dark depths of a cave (no buttons to press there, in my experience).
A startup called Gest is trying to take advantage of another body part: your fingers. The San Francisco startup is building a motion-sensor-filled device that wraps around your palm and includes rings that slide around four of your fingers (see “Get to Grips with Virtual Objects Using This Stripped-Down Glove”).