Watch this new video released by Samsung which shows their newly announced Rink VR motion controllers for Gear VR called Rink.
Samsung’s announcement of a set of new motion controllers, designed specifically for virtual reality headset Gear VR was certainly a welcome surprise. But other than a few images, we still don’t know how the hand-held devices work.
See Also: Samsung to Demo Gear VR Motion Controller ‘rink’ at CES 2016
Rink is developed by Samsung’s C-Lab R&D division and will be demo’d at CES 2016 this week. Samsung have now released a new video showing what the devices are like in action – leading to yet more speculation as to what the devices capabilities are.
The new video shows Rink in use in various applications, and may hint at possible gesture recognition. The video suffers from a poor framerate which makes it difficult to judge tracking fidelity, but itclearly shows some sort of positional tracking for the user’s hands in play. Plus, in some scenes the user’s virtual hands can be seen in various poses, with different fingers extended leading to different interactions in VR.
The unit comprises two handheld clips that slip over the hand, like two oversized money clips. Additionally, the system seems to require a headset mounted sensor device which it’s speculated tracks and received motion data from the hand controllers.
I suggested in an earlier article that the padding seen on the inside of the controllers may conceal sensors to detect muscle tension and therefore the position of a users fingers. Either that, or perhaps the large sensor unit atop the headset is using some sort of computer vision solution to detect hands.
All of this speculation should hopefully end next week as Samsung demonstrate the new controllers at CES, due to kick off properly on Wednesday.
Road to VR will be at CES to try and get some answers. Stay tuned.