Oculus touch controllers are your VR hands
Oculus touch arrived at my birthday, 16.12.
I already had someone tell me that these hand-controllers are a gimmick in IRC. As I put them to work I struggled to come up with things that would be farther from the truth.
Touch controller can give an impression that you have virtual hands that you can grab tools with. It can become an any tool that you pick up in the game. It reminded me about the Steam controller that could change the configuration of its touch pads in middle of a game.
The games have to take it into consideration they cannot push, harm or put the player falling. Also they have to acknowledge that the computer room won't disappear and neither the HMD cable. The resolution doesn't even get near to allowing you to read small prints. You can sit at some games as long as you're careful to not roll over the wire with the chair. A nice VR experience doesn't need to defeat all of these limitations.
VR in its current state gives you a virtual world where you can poke with your hand controllers. This makes certain modelling related tasks extremely easier.
FPS games seem a lot like equaqtion for nausea in VR. Despite that I think there will be some brilliant VR FPS shooters with free movement now that touch controllers are out. I hope they will come with western or science fiction themes eventually.
Touch controllers almost feel like they were made for shooters. For example Dead & buried is a saloon shooter with no locomotion. Ironically playing it is probably healthy because you have to do some gym squats and liftups to win matches. Another cool thing is that if you do a proper gun holding posture it will actually works and improves the aim considerably.
The precision of these controllers is good enough that you can place a virtual glow stick lean on a ledge, or build brick towers. Is there a gain in playing with bricks in virtual reality? Well... I name some nice things about virtual bricks: You got infinite amount of them, there's no chance to stab your heels on them, you can break them without a loss and you won't need to clean them off afterwards.
Oculus has recognized a social angle in VR. They made the toybox demo so that people can count 1+1=2. Touch controllers, Proper microphone and proper headphones integrated into the HMD equals virtual meetings.
Large installs constantly reminded me that I don't have an internet via optic fiber. That upsets me a bit. Now I need even more bandwidth that I don't manage to have.
I feel lot of exciting VR games, toys and programs will feel underwhelming when you watch youtube videos about them. To give an idea of why, the reason is that things such as Ragdolls, paddles, balls can be interesting in VR. Simple things can present as infinitely stretching syntax puzzles as you search what the authors have programmed in and emphasized.
I hope they won't over-engineer or upgrade their controller shape much. This helps keep the controller shape and model consistent with the virtual shape and it's awesome when you have a VR controller that actually matches the layout of your controller! It feels just right.
Last of all I really hope Oculus will provide Linux support soon. If it won't be there next year I will be extremely disappointed. When I tell you I don't want to be a Windows-user I mean it. I know plenty of other Oculus users that think the same and own a Linux desktop somewhere.
Oculus Linux version wouldn't even need to interop with desktop in any manner. VR is already great enough for not having a desktop in the first place. Also there are places where you really want dedicated VR systems with no desktop. Oculus staff should recognize this and provide the Linux SDK and drivers.