Close Up With ‘Rink’, Gear VR’s Prototype Motion Controller

We caught up with the developers of Rink, a new wireless motion controller that uses a combination of magnetic field enabled positional tracking and infra-red finger tracking.

Here’s a closer look at the new motion controllers which we wrote about recently, in development as part of the Samsung C-Labs incubator program, an initiative to encourage exploration and development of new technologies. It’s the brainchild of Yongjin Cho, a Senior Engineer at Samsung’s Creativity Lab
We have a more detailed hands-on coming soon, but we thought you might take a high resolution look at the controllers, which are surprisingly well finished for prototype hardware.

The rink system comprises two handheld ‘money clip’ style controllers and one basestation. The two hand units connect via bluetooth LTE to the Gear VR, the basestation is, in essence, a dumb magnetic field generator. The handheld controllers do most of the work, using the relative strength of the magnetic field generated by the basestation to gauge position in space.

In addition, the rink controller have IR LED sensors that fire towards your fingers and are able to detect the flexing of your digits.

We’ll be back with our impressions later, but we’ll leave with you with these high-res shots to pore over in the mean time.