Our Hand in VR

VR is one of those things that tends to come off as a totally immersive experience, or it doesn't really work at all. The fact that most virtual reality experiences are very high level and do not have a ton of game mechanics means that users really need to buy into the world for the experience to be a success...

Content is king

We have quite a bit of experience integrating VR into public activations and we have found that several things hinder the user experience of many VR activations. First, the content is king. Like many other visual mediums, it is imperative to hit users with something compelling right away to capture their interest.

This approach, however, is relatively short lived. Visual impact needs to be backed up with a solid in game experience to keep users engaged for even short periods of time. Through our user testing we have found that including a reactive body model that roughly follows the user and the ability for the participant to use their virtual hands to interact instead of a controller, this can take the user to a much deeper level of connectedness.

Point field hand trackers

It is nice to say you want virtual hands in your experience, it is another thing entirely to get them to work. We have had several point field hand trackers including the Leap Motion and Microsoft Kinect. Each of them have their own strengths and weaknesses, but there is not one clear winner that gives programmers an all in one solution. We often find ourselves having to use several tracking systems in conjunction to get the level of fidelity that we are looking for.

It appears that we are not the only ones facing this particular challenge. Facebook and Oculus have recently been buying up different hand tracking technologies, presumably to integrate with their VR unit. It seems like a logical step and a good piece of technology to include in an oculus offering in the future. Once a good system is commercially available it will be interesting to see the what the tech world at large is able to do with this increased functionality.

The future of VR technology is on the horizon...

It seems like creating an engaging and reactive body model that can be integrated into a good commercial VR system is the current holy grail of VR experiences. We have been working with the current technology to get the best results that we can, but we are really excited to see the future of this technology.

Check out some of the links to see the new things happening in VR tracking:

http://www.wired.com/2015/07/facebook-oculus-snap-another-vr-hand-tracker/

http://cvrlcode.ics.forth.gr/handtracking/

https://www.leapmotion.com/product/vr

http://nimblevr.com/