With the announcement of Rock Band VR comes an interesting question: how will the guitar be tracked? One method—as seen in the announcement promo video—may be to stick an Oculus Touch controller to the end.
I’ve watched the announcement promo for Rock Band VR entirely too many times and I still can’t tell. Is the Oculus Touch shown on the end of the guitars a joke as part of the sketch, or the actual way that the guitars will be tracked in the game?
I’m predicting that people reading this article will fall into two camps. The first of which is thinking “of course it’s a joke!” And the second is thinking “it’s obviously not a joke!”
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On the one hand, it seems a little silly, and a little awkward, to stick the Oculus Touch controller on the end of a Rock Band guitar. Presumably this would necessitate some sort of clip to fix the controller in place so that it wouldn’t fly off in the midst of a serious jam session. We can see the folks in the video give their guitars some pretty serious abuse (like when Palmer Luckey knees his) and yet the controllers hold firm.
The clip would also have to be universal for the uniquely right or left hand Touch controllers (indeed, in the video we can see both a left and right handed controller mounted differently to the head of separate guitars). There’s that strangeness and the fact that if this was a joke, it would fit in quite nicely with the theme of the announcement promo.
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On the other hand… it does seem like a logical way to go about it the process of tracking the guitar using what players already have rather than asking them to buy another instrument (for those who are already long time Rock Band-ers). Right?
BUT… what would this mean for other instruments? This is a Rock Band game after all, not Guitar Hero, so we would hope and expect other instruments to come into play… but how would you track say, the keyboard? Or the drums? You might think the obvious answer to the latter is to have players use virtual drum sticks instead of tracked real ones, but air-drumming with no feedback is going to going to leave players wanting, especially while their guitar-wielding band mates get the feedback of an actual prop.
It is for these reasons that I still can’t make up my mind about whether or not this is for real. We’ve got word out to Oculus to confirm, and we can all be comforted by the fact that we will be able to play Rock Band in virtual reality one way or another!