We reported recently that an extremely promising new motion control system based on the IGS Glove, known as Control VR, hit Kickstarter. Well, the upper body motion capture system which includes the impressive finger tracking data gloves has rocketed to 95% of it’s $250k goal in just 5 days. Now, the company is openly welcoming members of the VR community to one of their offices for an open demonstration of the new system.
In a reddit post on subreddit /r/oculus, BrandonJa one of Control VR’s developers, invited anyone in the downtown LA area over to their offices for beer, pizza and come hands-on time with Control VR. Shortly afterwards, impressions from those who took Brandon up on his offer began to appear and the feedback is resoundingly positive.
Reddit user ggodin was one of the first to post some of his thoughts:
The first demo with the gloves that I got to try was a moon exploration demo that they created. Your avatar is wearing a full astronaut suit with some weird interface at the bottom of your helmet that I didn’t really get (I think they should remove those). Once Spencer told me that I could look at my hands I was amazed! I could rotate them, squeeze them, do weird finger movements and they were all tracked fluidly. The latency was barely noticeable honestly. I would guesstimate it to around 50-75 ms between moving a finger and seeing it move in the HMD. They also had a TV behind showing what I was seeing. Later on I could notice the TV had a much higher latency than what you actually see in the HMD.
It’s interesting to note that, with proper calibration, the gloves in particular seem to be extremely accurate and the latency low:
I tried several things to push the gloves limits. I tried holding my hands together; the palms were touching in the game but the fingers were bending backwards a little bit. This was due to calibration they said and in fact later on, after re-calibrating, my fingers were closer when doing the same pose. The arm models moved very closely to my actual arms, this was quite impressive. The shoulders of the skeletal model were probably a little wider than mine so some arm/elbow movements were a little off. Also when putting a hand on top of my head, the hand appeared a n inch in front of my forehead in game. Again I think the little glitches come from the initial calibration. It’s important to note that none of the demos had any noticeable drift. In fact, the rift yaw (DK1) seemed to drift while my arms and fingers stayed in place.
All very promising indeed then. And we have to say that the way Control VR has chosen to ‘do business’ on their Kickstarter campaign shows an impressive understanding of the growing VR community. It also shows an inordinate amount of confidence when they’re willing to invite anyone into their offices to try their prototype hardware.
We’re hoping to get some hands-on time with Control VR during the E3 show this week. We’ll of course update soon with our impressions once we have them. And Control VR’s Kickstarter page can be found here.
