Controls design

[philpax]

Bouncing around a couple of ideas here for using XIVR with two Oculus Touch-style controls:

• Movement is done through non-dominant analogue stick
  • Teleportation handled by out-of-body faux-walking, similar to VRChat
• Basic motion controller mapping to hotbars
  • hold button down to bring up rings that you target with your controller
  • hold button down to target someone else
• Basic interaction with the UI through being able to drag a virtual cursor around

[philpax]

Voice controls. ("Cure 2! Cure 2! Regen!")

[philpax]

Hand-tracking. The ultimate in immersion, I feel, because being able to use your hands to communicate is such an important part of the human experience.

Problems:

• no way to access Quest hand tracking data through the PC officially, but you can in Unity and Unreal for the sole purpose of development. (wtf, Oculus?)
• limited availability between platforms. Only currently available when running the Quest 2 natively, so we'd likely have to use ALVR to provide us with that data. Index has partial hand-tracking, but only really measures finger curl.
• synchronising the state of 26 joints. probably not a huge issue with enough delta compression and packed encoding.
• lack of tangible input surfaces. You have your fingers, which are very versatile, but there's no convenient way to turn them into a tool for movement.
  • initial proposal: use non-dominant thumb as virtual thumbstick. this isn't very comfortable, and the range of movement on your thumb is limited for this purpose (very difficult to go back unless you remap the neutral position to be halfway between being unextended and being fully extended, which would suck for other reasons)
  • proposal the second: external hardware device that straps onto your hands whose sole purpose is to give you buttons and a thumbstick. eminently doable, but requires all players using hand tracking to build or purchase such a device.
  • proposal the third: use hand tracking gloves produced by the market. problem: there are no commercially viable hand tracking gloves that are good right now. solution: let's see what LucidVR pull off.
  • proposal the fourth: give up and wait for hardware and software to get better in this area