Several weeks into using the Carl Zeiss Cinemizer OLED headtracker it has become an invaluable controller interface for me. I find myself one more step closer to Count Zero , I really do have a Deck infront of me , Lenovo not Ono Sendai perse but that's close enough , with a portable wearable display that weighs less than some 80s shades and headtracking to control it all. Cyberspace exists as the the interweb we know and hate all that is missing is a hostile AI chasing me, a girl with razor sharp nails, and Rastafari in space.. but those things will come .. Soon very soon I will be able to add leap motion to the VR mix and actually see my hands on screen whilst moving the fov with my head ...but that is for another day .. Let's take a look at my latest adventures with the headtracker.
The greatest competition that VR leaning controllers like headtrackers face is from your humble control and input devices that you use every day . So if you game more effectively with a mouse or joypad , than a complex whiz bang super low latency weak force detecting black matter powered VR full body motion controller ... or you can't be bothered to setup the Kinect SDK for each app then you have no need for such a device... Epic Fail...
The Zeiss Headtracker is different.
Adding the Zeiss Headtracker to your daily routine requires 0 effort unlike other VR control solutions that suffer from complex setup, usage and require additional software layers and drivers. You are not going to be paying some hack to make a hack for your favourite app or game to work because it works out of the box with all your apps and games through mouse emulation and with the 3 degrees of freedom expected of such devices.
There are reasons why no one has developed either a VR app ,game or control interface that works or more importantly is of use .. nothing to do with latencies and degrees of freedom or even cpu power. The main reason is that as of yet there is 0 need for such a device or application outside serious scientific or technical circles.
The Zeiss headtracker will also arrive with media fanfares of VR blurb, but that is not its true strength. the Zeiss headtracker is something you need,something you can use right now , whether to follow this line of text or to control today's and tomorrows applications.
Using it is totally natural, intuitive, unconscious even, you do not need to learn special movements or swipes or holds as you do with other motion controllers.
Natural Intuitive Unconscious Cyberpunk control.
For 3 decades or so ,whatever progress there has been in cpu or gpu power to create ever more believable worlds in which we game, the input method has barely changed, the most effective mouse, keyboard, joystick paradigms are still in play to day.
However these are unnatural control methods, involving abstract or completely unrelated physical actions that are then translated into in game or application actions. Dragging a mouse to move your point of view ..or pecking at a keyboard..
The Zeiss headtracker is a completely natural control and input mechanism as you are actually using a real movement that is being translated into the same movement in game.
Furthermore it is totally intuitive and an almost unconscious act, what I find after 3 decades of gaming is I tend to turn my head towards where my joypad or mouse is being moved anyway.. so with the headtracker I am already acting in game without ever thinking about key presses , thumb stick movement or waiting for my ageing neurons to fire the signals from my brain down to my hand to move a mouse in an abstract and unnatural way that my brain tells me translates to an in game action.
All that process is eliminated with headtracking, I see a bad guy in game , my fov has already moved to centre on him, tracking an object in flight like the fast moving bats or air craft in Borderlands 2 is no longer a mouse arc , you just look at them follow their path with your head , which you will be doing naturally anyway . This is instinctive control. Once you use it ,you will not want to go back to other forms of control.
So on with the show :
First up we have FRACT OSC which is ideally suited for playing with head tracking. This is also quite possibly the only example of a non violent FPS game in development.
Skyrim played with the Zeiss Headtracker
Call of Duty Black Ops 2 in 3D played with the Carl Zeiss Cinemizer OLED headtracker
more to follow, hopefully I will have a Leap Motion unit soon to combine with the Zeiss Headtracker..
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