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Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

blog.vive.com

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Re: Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

#71

Post by m-p-3 »

veli_joza wrote: post #30

Just look at this nonsense [1]. We have brand new technology with unlimited potential for new abstractions and paradigms. So, what do we do? We make a virtual desktop workstation, the same one we had since 70s! We limit all rendering to a 2D surface, make it curved and put a nebula in the background. Is this really the cutting edge of information technologies? Also, we need both mechanical keyboard to sense key press…

Maybe, but the current state of VR makes it clumsy to use in some scenarios. I expect this to go away with time and further development, but right now there's a gap to fill. One step at a time allows us to go far.

Re: Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

#72

Post by mncharity »

veli_joza wrote: post #38
ewjordan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely do not want facial features and eye movement to completely replace finger movement for input. I can neither control my eyes nor face at anywhere near the rate that I can control my fingers. If VR wants to replace my desktop environment for anything other than games, it'll need to retain some sort of high fidelity, high frequency input vector.

Yeah, I wouldn't use facial and eye tracking instead of traditional input interface. They are meant to enrich interaction with other people. Eye tracking could be used for some optimizations, like dynamic LoD based on user focus. I thought about input interface that could replace keyboard for VR and mobile devices. Brain implant would be perfect, but that's not feasible with today's technology. Voice is good contende…

> I was thinking about touch sensitive surface that recognizes drawn glyphs.

I'd like a touch sensitive surface... on a keyboard.

Consider an expert keyboard user. With a nice keyboard. Adding downward-facing hand tracking, such as a head-mounted Leap Motion, adds value. Now you can gesture on the keyboard, and above it in 3D. Permitting a very rich input vocabulary. And, for example, using the entire keyboard as a touch surface. Except... while fingers are highly sensitive to tactile contact, neither traditional keyboards, nor current hand tracking, can provide good contact information. Finger-tip position tracking isn't quite good enough to infer contact existence and pressure. So while you can use say the J-key keycap surface as a trackpad, and even infer touch-untouch events from gross finger motion (better than requiring a keypress, but not by much), you still can't get light-touch events (eg "I was clearly pressing harder when I stroked down, but just skimming when I moved back up - I clearly felt the difference, so why didn't the keyboard?") So, I'd love a contact sensing mesh which could be laid over an existing nice keyboard, without compromising key feel. I can get position information elsewhere, and keypresses from the keyboard of course, but there's no existing source of multitouch contact, let alone pressure. Any ideas?

Re: Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

#73

Post by mncharity »

If you want to explore this kind of thing, you can mount a camera on your HMD (Vive's is crippled), use a WebVR stack (simple), track objects using visual markers and javascript tracking libraries (jsartoolkit5 and/or tracking.js), and do selective camera pass-through AR. It's crufty, but not hard.

EDIT: You can simply use the Vive's camera, with tracking.js color tracking, especially with a small minDimension (number of pixels) threshold. Yellow is good.

https://artoolkit.github.io/jsartoolkit5/examples/ https://trackingjs.com/examples/color_camera.html ; http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/ https://joric.org/keycaps/#GB-Retro-DSA etc

Re: Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

#75

Post by setr »

veli_joza wrote: post #30

Just look at this nonsense [1]. We have brand new technology with unlimited potential for new abstractions and paradigms. So, what do we do? We make a virtual desktop workstation, the same one we had since 70s! We limit all rendering to a 2D surface, make it curved and put a nebula in the background. Is this really the cutting edge of information technologies? Also, we need both mechanical keyboard to sense key press…

An infinite real estate computing environment is a pretty damn good value prop imo; a hell of a lot better than vr is being pushed atm (360 vid and games).

The problem with the gif is that it doesn't make any use of the "virtual" environment, but this is where vr should be heading at least as the intermediate before fully interactive vr.

That, and porn

Re: Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

#76

Post by boobsbr »

BatFastard wrote: post #40
boobsbr wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, Larry Niven's "The Ringworld Engineers". The main protagonist uses a "droud" (as the implant is called in the book) to directly stimulate the brain with electrical impulses. He only disconects the droud because he knows he will die from starvation, dehydration and atrophy if the doesn't go through the motions daily. But every moment without the droud is existential dread.

Don't most droud users indeed kill themselves through neglect in that story? Louis Wu the protagonist is extraordinary in that he gave up the droud.

I don't know about other users wasting away, but I remember Chmeee (of the tiger-like species) destroying the droud when they were travelling to the Ringworld, so Louis Wu was without an option on quitting it.

Re: Logitech announces a development kit for using keyboards in virtual reality

#77

Post by Rayz0r41 »

kirrent wrote: post #17
swalsh wrote: post #14

Combine this with the new Pimax, and infinite workspaces start to become a practical reality. Which could help propgate the technology more which would lead seamlessly into more teleconferences, which have a feeling of personal interactions... which is important, even if we as programmers don't always appreciate it. The other day I was playing a game of onward. It was the rare instance that a team wanted to work toge…

I love that natural feeling of interaction with other people in VR. When playing in Rec Room so often you take a break from games to just have a chat with some other people because the interaction is somehow so engaging despite the cartoony graphics.

Same here - I usually avoid multiplayer games altogether but this weekend I discovered VR poker and was utterly immersed - am playing in my first tournament tonight!
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