[veidr]

I'm not a huge gamer, aside from fitness games like Thrill of the Fight, but I've tried a bunch of VR games just to see.

And there is just no way that a lightsaber game could be good without haptic feedback, in a world where haptic feedback exists. And I think many other kinds of game.

YouTube guy MKBHD even called out the lack of haptics in his initial impressions video, not even for a game: the butterfly flew over to him in the Apple demo, and he held out his finger, and when the butterfly landed on it... nothing. And that was kind of jarring, he said. (And it would be.)

Haptic feedback is a big deal.

[elefanten]

Oculus wands would make a barely more compelling experience of a butterfly landing on your finger.

When Apple’s ready they’ll release haptic gloves that smash that experience out of the park.

[veidr]

Hope so! I would buy them immediately. :-D

(Not holding my breath, though...)

And yeah, the Oculus controllers wouldn't nail the butterfly on finger demo, but if they had controllers, the demo would be a hawk landing on your forearm. (And that would work, even though it doesn't quite make sense that your palm would vibrate when a bird lands on your forearm... but haptic feedback is weird.)

[throw74775]

By haptics you mean a buzzer? That doesn’t replicate any kind of real-world experience.

But again - there is no reason gamers can’t have a control, but it’s silly to use a game controller to interact with a computing environment when you can use your hands.

[veidr]

I am not sure how it works, but what PlayStation calls "rumble". In the light saber game, you can feel it when your light saber hits your opponent, or your light sabers clash, and it absolutely adds to the experience immensely. I think almost all players of those types of game would prefer to have that feedback, barring some kind of disability or something.

I don't think you need the haptic vibration function for interacting with floating menus and the OS, although again it helps for button presses, which is why all smartphones now feature haptic feedback.

But the other reason to use a controller in general-purpose OS use scenarios is precision. If you can directly touch something, then by all means that is the best. But if the menu to be interacted with is too far away, say 8 meters away, all current systems I have seen make you shout a beam out of your hand to the button or object, then do some gesture to click.

A controller is way more accurate for this, kind of how a mouse is more precise for most people than a trackpad. But even more so.

So on all of Meta's systems so far, the controller can more precisely highlight and click things at distance. And I think this holds true for all other currently-available systems as well.

What Apple Vision Pro is bringing that is new, though, is the eye-tracking. Supposedly, it is as good as, or perhaps even better, at selecting an object at distance. If so, then yeah, controllers wouldn't really provide a significant advantage for most non-game activity.

[throw74775]

Yeah - I’ve tried metas controllers and it felt clumsy and effortfull to use the UI. The descriptions of Apple’s eye tracking sound far superior.

Why wouldn’t makers of light saber toys just add a buzzer? That would be far better than a game controller, and super cheap to add.

[veidr]

You mean... so we could like, battle our small children in our kitchens with lightsabers?

My kids indeed do have sword toys that vibrate and make sounds, so I have done this. And I'm sorry to have to report that it is... substantially less compelling than fighting Darth Vader in VR. (Perhaps not for them, though.)