Valve's Knuckles VR controller looks pretty decent, dev kits going out

Valve stated they couldn't provide us with one and HTC never replied

That really is piss poor considering GOL's online presence. Not even replying is just rude.

You would have thought a bunch of geeks would know how to hold a phone/camera properly

Anyway, to me it doesn't look like VR is taking off all that well. Developers don't seem to be in any kind of rush to make full use of it, and it's been around plenty long enough.
Anyone else notice that?

At moment it seems like there is more chance of VR taking off on Consoles than PC. But yea, due to system requirements, poor library of shovelware, low resolution image (pixel grid), wires tangling, cost .. ermm im sure there is more, oh yea drivers.. On PC at least it remains in the realm of early adopter.

Wow... I'm not into VR things, but would like to get my hands on those just for testing out regular games with it. :D

Valve stated they couldn't provide us with one and HTC never replied

That really is piss poor considering GOL's online presence. Not even replying is just rude.

Valve themselves or developers from valve actually do arrange vr headsets for those they deem productive, like those that (help) developing vr (applications) on/for linux and do not have the means themselves.
Valve developers are very helpful and they deserve at least some respect.
I don't know about HTC, but for them it will be request nr. n1000.
At the current state I don't think it is interesting for valve to promote the VR on steamos yet, as they are still developing on RADV and hoping nvidia will follow. Next thing is that every linux user will be buying a htc vive and then the shit hits the fans because they all will demand something and feel betrayed and whatever consumers think these days.
So I can understand valve too.

I want that knuckles!

Maybe developers are not rushing, but since i started play with VR i dont see regular monitor games with same eyes :S im just playing VR nowdays. I hope you try it out someday and you will understand. True that there is not big resolution, but enough to enjoy. Soon we will have next VR hmd generation with 4k and wireless.
Btw, when fallout 4 VR appear, i will disappear from real world XD

You would have thought a bunch of geeks would know how to hold a phone/camera properly

Anyway, to me it doesn't look like VR is taking off all that well. Developers don't seem to be in any kind of rush to make full use of it, and it's been around plenty long enough.
Anyone else notice that?

Guess you missed that Fallout 4, Skyrim and a new Doom game are all being made for VR? Movie studios are releasing trailer/teaser/short films in 'VR' as well (I put that in ' because they are more like advanced view finders..)

VR is taking off a lot better than I'd expect with the price of them. I wouldn't say plenty long enough. The first available sets were in people's hands only slightly more than a year, with a small amount of developers maybe a year before that.

Look how long it takes for any new console on the market to have games that aren't just slightly better than the last generation. Usually takes about a year. Hell, the PS4 has been out quite a long while now and they're only just getting games of the caliber of Horizon: Zero Dawn. A lot of the earlier ones certainly felt like they could have been done on the PS3.

I want that knuckles!

Maybe developers are not rushing, but since i started play with VR i dont see regular monitor games with same eyes :S im just playing VR nowdays. I hope you try it out someday and you will understand. True that there is not big resolution, but enough to enjoy. Soon we will have next VR hmd generation with 4k and wireless.
Btw, when fallout 4 VR appear, i will disappear from real world XD

So.. do you ever wonder if you were in Fallout 4 for the weekend.. then you finally popped the HMD off your head, then went outside if you'd start to expect Mutants jumping out of your neighbors backyard? Of course that's assuming they aren't actual mutants already :P

I tried Thrills & Chills - Roller Coasters(windows only) in VR last year when visiting a company, and if I remember correctly it was an HTC Vive. The image quality was quite bad. It felt a bit like I was wearing toy glasses that are meant to distort the view during the ride.

So.. do you ever wonder if you were in Fallout 4 for the weekend.. then you finally popped the HMD off your head, then went outside if you'd start to expect Mutants jumping out of your neighbors backyard? Of course that's assuming they aren't actual mutants already :P

I had that experience recently after playing too much ark on a regular monitor. I started looking for dilos when I was outside.

That's got to be the game, not the Vive. I've seen some that look pretty crap (Elite: Dangerous before they patched it, and without some boosting to super sampling is one), and I've seen some that look great, like Brookhaven Experiment.

Wow... I'm not into VR things, but would like to get my hands on those just for testing out regular games with it. :D

I thought the exact same thing, which is weird because I actually bought a Razer Hydra (that motion-control half-a-controller-in-each-hand controller) some years ago and ended up not using it after a first few tries because of how tiring it is in practice holding your arms up for more than a few minutes. I wouldn't mind giving these things a try, though. :)

At the current state I don't think it is interesting for valve to promote the VR on steamos yet, as they are still developing on RADV and hoping nvidia will follow.

While radv still needs a proper VK_KHX_external_semaphore and performance improvements, what Valve is really waiting for is STILL proper unity support for SteamVR with Vulkan. The unity 5.6 betas kinda worked, but not very well and supposedly they completely disabled SteamVR support for Linux in more recent unity builds.

Valve used Unity for even their own projects like "The Lab" and the SteamVR tutorial, so this is probably quite a hard dependency for them at the moment.

The idea of strapping the controller to your hand is that you don't have to hold them all the time but that's not because of hand fatigue. This makes grabbing and picking up ingame items natural because it will feel like actually taking hold of an item instead of just pushing a grip button on a controller you were already holding in your hand.

One of the other interesting features about this controller is that it has capacitive sensing for each finger and can even track the angle of the fingers when they're not on the controller.

Overall looks like a great direction for VR hand controllers, I just wish they got rid of the trackpad in favor of a thumbstick.


Last edited by badber on 26 June 2017 at 9:37 am UTC