Haptic sensations are a bigger part to virtual reality than many people know. Although they may go unnoticed inside of your VR game or experience, if you didn’t have them, you probably wouldn’t be as immersed as you usually are inside of VR. Haptic feedback in controllers is going to continue to be big for virtual reality, but building upon it and getting new ideas is going to be the name of the game going forward.
No matter the weight of the object you are picking up inside of VR, you are going to be lifting the same controller up and down. The haptics may be more sticky than others but the actual weight of the controller in your hand will never change. The Dragon VR Controller is looking to change that with their new dual-folding controller that is designed to bring the sensation of weight to virtual reality and resistance to your hands like never before. Two German researchers have been on this project for some time now, and they are finally ready to released a near finished project. While using this controller inside of virtual reality you are going to be able to feel the sensation of moving real objects in real time.
By using a fan that will fold and unfold throughout the experience, you are going to feel resistance like never before. The fans will close and open in different ways and will also produce the haptic feedback of lifting something of real weight. You will be able to feel like you are lifting, dragging, or even shifting objects in your virtual area. The project has been dubbed Drag:on, and is making headlines all across the virtual industry.
The duo of Zenner and Kruger, the makers of this project, first experimented with making an object that has a weight inside and shifts when being moved. Ironically enough they called this idea Shifty. This idea would rely on the weight cooperating a great amount, and that was a bad bet. They moved on from the idea quickly. Since then, the company has had better ideas that make more sense with the common day VR controllers and games. This is all thanks to the fans that open up. If you pick up a small ping pong ball in the game, the fans will open slightly to give you a small sensation of picking something up. If you pick up a bowling ball inside of virtual reality, the fans are going to open up all the way and give you much more air resistance than you had before. This is going to give you a much needed weighted experience.
This is going to give you a fun and more immersive experience going forward inside of VR going forward. If you are fighting against Rocky in Creed: Rise to Glory, you are going to feel the weight of the gloves on your hands as you evade and shift your body weight while landing a few solid punches on the old man. This is not only going to feel more immersive and real, but this is going to give you something that can make a workout for you. This could be the future of weight lifting inside of virtual reality as well.
As of right now this attachment is only working with Vive tracking and Valve and Vive base stations, but Dragon is hoping to make this compatible with Oculus in the near future. Whatever the case is with other headsets, we know that Vive users are going to be very happy to get a more real experience in their hands in the near future.
