Gadgetory

we're here at e3 2015 and we are looking at the final oculus rift that's going to be shipping early next year the final oculus rift looks quite a bit like the prototypes that we've been seeing for the past year but everything's better it's a lot more sturdy it feels like an has higher resolution wider field of view than the development kit everything about it's just a little bit more polished and a little bit more like the kind of thing that you can put on and you don't have to be a big VR enthusiast to think oh this is pretty great it's actually coming with an Xbox gamepad which is something that they announced last week which has managed to work really well but not because the Xbox gamepad is somehow magical but because they've managed to design a really good catalog of games that gets around sort of the the motion sickness and the problems that just playing a normal game in VR can give you ever since the second development kit the oculus rift has used what's called a positional tracking camera which is this right here and it tracks sensors in the rift headset so it can see where your head is the original riff could just tell sort of what direction you're tilting your head in and now you can actually lean over you can look over something and see what's going on it actually helps cut down on the motion sickness quite a bit it also lets you do some really cool things with worlds in the oculus rift it's like being able to actually lean over a table instead of just moving around it with a controller so like I said the oculus rift is going to ship with an Xbox one controller but that's not the final game plan these are prototypes for what's called the oculus touch which is a handheld motion controller that's a little bit like the Wii Nunchuk if it actually worked really well it's essentially a very simple controller that runs very heavily on these triggers that kind of mimic the motion of your hand this is basically a controller designed to tell when you're making a fist it has sensors on this trigger and on this analog stick right here that can actually tell when your touching them so you don't have to clamp down on it for it to tell how your hands are moving it can actually tell if you're sticking your thumb up and it will give you a thumbs up we got to try it out on what they were calling a toy box which is just throwing a bunch of things around and even though I have a couple of little glitches overall the whole thing tracked incredibly well it's a huge improvement over just hand motion controls like the Kinect because it's really really precise and being able to just click a button instead of trying to make a fist and have it recognize that fist it gives you a lot of very fine control that we haven't quite managed to do with just camera detection yet if you're excited about using these you're gonna have to wait a little bit longer than for the oculus rift the rift comes down in the first quarter of 2016 and this isn't out until sometime in the first half we also don't know how much it will cost but and again we don't know how much the wrist is going to cost either or even the exact date that it's coming out so there's a lot that we're still waiting for here but this is the first time we've actually gotten to try out more or less what people are going to be seeing when they buy the wrist next year