The criticisms of tracked hand motion are spot on, at least with regards to the Leap Motion device. But even if the controller were to work well, having no feedback makes actually interacting with the environment extremely difficult.
So I hacked together a haptic glove out of an Arduino, a few vibrating motors, and a WebSocket-to-Serial-Port bridging program in a weekend. Took it to National Maker Faire and demoed it to a few hundred people. There were only a handful of skeptics, and of them, only two of them walked away unconvinced. Even basic haptics has a huge impact on the believability of the motion interaction.
Hey there! So I imagine based on your "you guys" comment you're actually thinking of NullspaceVR [0]. They are a team out of Rochester University that is developing a slew of haptic devices. I got to talk to them some and they are a very good group of people that hopefully we can do some work together in the near future.
I was there with DCVR [1]. We're a social meetup group for entrepreneurs and hobbyists in the Washington DC area centered around virtual reality. We decided to organize and put a booth together to help promote our individual projects, while also trying to grow our local community for our meetups. But otherwise, in regards to my projects, I was there myself.
Since you sound like you're in the area, please come to our next DCVR meetup. They are a lot of fun and it's probably one of the best ways to get involved with VR from scratch right now.
Comments
The criticisms of tracked hand motion are spot on, at least with regards to the Leap Motion device. But even if the controller were to work well, having no feedback makes actually interacting with the environment extremely difficult.
So I hacked together a haptic glove out of an Arduino, a few vibrating motors, and a WebSocket-to-Serial-Port bridging program in a weekend. Took it to National Maker Faire and demoed it to a few hundred people. There were only a handful of skeptics, and of them, only two of them walked away unconvinced. Even basic haptics has a huge impact on the believability of the motion interaction.
Hi! I saw you guys there! A friend suggested that adjustable tension in the glove rather than haptics might be a good way to deal with interaction.
Hey there! So I imagine based on your "you guys" comment you're actually thinking of NullspaceVR [0]. They are a team out of Rochester University that is developing a slew of haptic devices. I got to talk to them some and they are a very good group of people that hopefully we can do some work together in the near future.
I was there with DCVR [1]. We're a social meetup group for entrepreneurs and hobbyists in the Washington DC area centered around virtual reality. We decided to organize and put a booth together to help promote our individual projects, while also trying to grow our local community for our meetups. But otherwise, in regards to my projects, I was there myself.
Since you sound like you're in the area, please come to our next DCVR meetup. They are a lot of fun and it's probably one of the best ways to get involved with VR from scratch right now.
[0] https://twitter.com/nullspacevr
[1] http://www.meetup.com/Virtual-Reality-DCVR/