Oculus’ Brendan Iribe describes how they created ‘magical’ Oculus Touch virtual-reality controllers

GamesBeat: What about the controller situation? If you have this controller out there that’s optional, how do you get game developers to build for that?

Iribe: There needs to be killer content. More consumers will be there. In this early generation—Developers need years with an input device to make compelling content. They’ve had decades with game pads. They’ve now had a few years with game pads in VR. They’ve started to make some great experiences.

When we first launched the Kickstarter, within a few months we didn’t have all this content. It took a few years to build up this content. With the controllers, as we start to get out there and attract VR controllers, it’s just going to take a while for developers to get their hands on these things, learn how they work, figure out how to make experiences with them that are compelling. Those games will take six to 12 to 18 months for developers to make a piece of content. You’ll see that when we launch the Rift. Oculus Touch is optional, but within a short amount of time there will be enough content where we’ll bring Oculus Touch in.

But the game pad is going to be one of the best controllers for a lot of content. This is still early days. I could be totally wrong. It’s so early we just don’t know yet. But when you put hands on the touch controllers and see your hands, this works well for first-person experiences where I want to see my hands, where I need to see my hands. In a lot of games you don’t want to see your hands. You want to move a little character around in a third-person view. Lucky’s Tale, the Xbox One controller is the best controller. It’s the best controller for Chronos and a lot of what we showed here today.

You’re going to have a different set of inputs for other first-person experiences. That’s not going to be everything that’s in VR. That’s going to be some category of VR. If they want to show your hands, they’re going to be using hand controllers. Then there will be a lot of first-person and third-person experiences where they don’t want you to see your hands. They want you to just invisibly control some character or some scene. They’re not going to need the touch controllers.

GamesBeat: Have you spent any time with the touch controllers? What are they like to use?

Iribe: They’re awesome. They’re magical. You have to try them at E3. They’re as magical as the Rift is when you put it on and you don’t expect it to be as good as it is, because you’re just so skeptical about VR. Right until that moment when you slip in and everything changes. Oculus Touch is similar. You put on the headset and as soon as the controllers are in your hands, you look down and think, “Wow, those are my hands.”

We’ll continue to make them better. We like to set expectations. This is just the beginning of hand presence. Now you can actually see them. But what you want to do over time is see them perfectly. You want to get to a point where that’s your thumbnail, that’s exactly you. You want to look down and really think, “Those are my real legs and my real feet.” Maybe I’m dressed up differently. Maybe I’m textured differently. But the more I can see myself, the stronger the sense of presence is going to be, the more I’m going to believe I’m in that environment.

Oculus Touch is the first generation on this longer-term path toward fully getting your hands immersed. We believe in the power of finger presence as well. You don’t hear that from everyone. That’s something we’re committed to. We have a long-term vision built around our sensor technology, built around optical sensor technology. The only way you’re going to get your full body into the experience is going to be with optical sensor technology.

Above: Brendan Iribe, the head of Oculus VR at Facebook

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat

GamesBeat: There will be cameras built into those rigs to see the position of your fingers? How would it do that?

Iribe: Not in this generation. It has a gyro built in, as well as the constellation tracking system. That same external sensor is able to track that. We’re also going to be showing, at E3, multiple sensors that you can use. Imagine you could put two sensors in front of you and track an even wider volume. That’s what’s great about this sensor system.

GamesBeat: Is it a little bit like Valve and HTC, or very different from the lasers that they’re using?

Iribe: It’s a different mechanism. We’re focused on optical tracking. We see a long future in leveraging the camera technology that is being used in every cell phone and being able to put—These are very inexpensive. If you wanted, over time, to have a lot of rich 3D reconstruction, both of your hands and the environment, you want to start putting sensors on headsets. You want to start putting sensors on controllers, and not just externally. With optical sensors, they’re small and light. You can put them on. We see a long future in optical tracking.

GamesBeat: How long do you think it will take until VR is as widely accepted as consoles or mobile devices?

Iribe: Realistically, it will take a while to get to the ubiquity of cell phones, where there’s billions of people with smartphones. This has been around for 30 years. It started as a personal computer. It shrunk down and shrunk down. Cell phones have been around 20 years or so. It’s going to take a while to get to where there are hundreds of millions of people in VR. I do absolutely think it will happen, but it will take time.

This is the very beginning. Today there are zero consumers in VR. We’re about to ship the first consumer VR product. Other people are going to ship the first set of consumer VR devices, and we’ll start to get some number of people, hopefully from hundreds of thousands to millions, in VR. But it’s just the beginning.

GamesBeat: You talk about V2 and V3. How long do you think the iterations are going to take?

Iribe: We’re going to move very quickly. That’s one of the things we’ve decided internally. This isn’t going to be like console cycles where they’re five, six, seven years long. We’re going to iterate quickly. We want to increase the whole experience. Whether it’s resolution, optics, tracking, everything is going to get better very rapidly. But it’s going to be incredible right now, today, with the Oculus Rift.

Above: Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi/GamesBeat