When I was a smaller human being, I used to pretend to be a Jedi by deflecting tennis balls with a plastic lightsaber. One day the tennis ball won, and my seemingly indestructible lightsaber snapped in half. My path to become a real Jedi was over…
That was until as of five minutes ago, when I saw this tech demo for the Oculus Rift DK2. A company called Sixense Entertainment have tinkered away at a new peripheral that works in tandem with the Oculus Rift DK2 to enable full position and orientation tracking for both the user’s head and hands.
Technical lingo aside, all you need to know is that it works. See for yourself in the video below.
Here’s what Sixense have to say about the demo:
“The lightsaber or sword is the true test for a one-to-one motion tracking system in VR, because it requires low latency, and almost perfect tracking of both position and orientation between your physical and your virtual self as you perform swipes, slashes, blocks and counters with the lightsaber.
“The STEM System and the SixenseVR SDK make this experience possible, and also make it easy for developers to create these types of applications quickly. The experience is a fantasy, but it feels natural because of the near-perfect hand-eye coordination that the SixenseVR SDK provides.”
All you need now is an omni-directional treadmill and a fleshed our Star Wars VR game and you’re good to go! You can learn more about the STEM system, and check out more tech demos here.
In the meantime I’m off to find my old Jedi robes; I hope they still fit.