HTC says that the new Vive Pro controllers, due out later this year, will be an updated version of the current Vive wands, rather than Valve’s anticipated ‘Knuckles’ controllers.
Upon unveiling the Vive Pro earlier this week, HTC demonstrated the new headset with the original Vive wand controllers but said that new controllers, compatible with SteamVR Tracking 2.0, would be introduced and sold alongside the Vive Pro later this year. Many hoped the forthcoming Vive Pro controllers would take the form of Valve’s anticipated ‘Knuckles’ design, but the company has confirmed to Road to VR that’s not the case.
The original Vive wand controller | Photo by Road to VR
Instead of the Knuckles controllers, HTC plans to ship the Vive Pro with a pair of updated wand controllers which will include the SteamVR Tracking 2.0 sensors. The company says the wands will see a refreshed design, but it won’t be Knuckles.
The Vive community has been excited for the Knuckles controllers since their introduction last year. The controllers have a unique design that’s a stark departure from the Vive wands: they’re more compact and feature a ‘cinch’ that allows the controller to be worn around the palm so that the user can let go of the controller’s body entirely to facilitate more natural gripping gestures. The Knuckles controllers also include capacitive sensors capable of analog finger tracking. Reports indicate they are a good answer to Oculus’ Touch controllers, which are preferred by many over the Vive wands.
Valve has been iterating on the Knuckles design, and shipped dev kits to developers back in June, 2017. Since then, anticipation has only grown, and the Vive community has been eagerly waiting the controller’s public availability.
As for why HTC made this choice, it sounds like it may not have been up to them.
“Knuckles release date and introduction is a Valve question,” an HTC spokesperson told Road to VR,suggesting that the company would be shipping with Knuckles, if the option was available.
Since HTC and Valve worked closely together on the development of the Vive, it has long felt like a natural conclusion that Knuckles would eventually become part of the Vive system.
Image courtesy Cloudhead Games
But with HTC just about ready to roll out a new headset, and still no Knuckles in sight, it’s possible that Valve is taking a different approach with the controllers—perhaps they plan to sell them direct to customers? It’s not implausible, given that Valve makes and sells the Steam Controller direct to PC gamers. Valve might want Knuckles to become a common VR input device across all SteamVR headsets so that developers have a consistent target for developing their input interactions. Or maybe Valve just hasn’t finished designing them.
With no recent update from Valve, it’s hard to say. We’ve reached out to ask the company for a status update on the development and release roadmap for Knuckles, and you’ll hear from us if we hear from them.
Back in February this year, Valve confirmed that they were internally developing three “full” VR titles. While there’s still no information surrounding genres or launch dates, it now looks like Valve may just be keeping them tight under wraps as usual, and hasn’t forgotten about the projects after all.
Dan O’Brien, Vive general manager for the Americas, revealed to The Rolling Stone that Valve was still “very committed” to the promise of delivering its three VR games:
“I manage the relationship with Valve,” O’Brien says. “I meet with Valve weekly to talk about everything from what’s happening on new content launching to new product launches to new features and new functions. They are very committed; they are still committed to delivering on that promise.”
O’Brien declined to comment any further on the subject.
As one of Valve’s closest VR hardware partners, HTC and Valve worked together to produce the Vive headset, becoming the first to adopt Valve’s Lighthouse tracking solution. Outside of Valve itself, there’s no better authority on its VR dealings, making O’Brien’s statement a rare peek into the company’s otherwise secretive game development.
Outside of its landmark PC hits including the Half-Life series, Portal,Dota 2, and Counter Strike; Valve produced the incredibly slick (and still extremely fun) The Lab (2016), a free collection of mini-games that shows just what room-scale VR can do. The Lab currently sits at a 97% approval rating on Steam, making it the 3rd most popular VR game on the store. The thought of getting to play not one, but three full titles at that level of quality would undoubtedly attract more potential headset owners, as they would likely be instantly hailed as VR ‘AAA’ titles in their own right.
Valve is concurrently developing a more ergonomic motion controller called Knuckles that straps to your hand to enable better hand presence. Developer kits have since shipped to a lucky few studios, although with the lack of this year’s Steam Dev Days, Valve hasn’t released any more information on exactly when the controllers will land in the hands of consumers.
Valve head Gabe Newell said earlier this year that much like Nintendo’s penchant for concurrently designing hardware and software, that doing both “will actually allow [Valve] to build much better entertainment experiences for people.”
And no. We don’t know if one of the games is going to be Half-Life 3. We’ll of course be keeping our eyeballs peeled for any sign of it – along with the rest of humanity.
Valve is developing a pair of more immersive hand controllers currently called “Knuckles” that promise to offer more precise finger tracking and grasping sensations in VR. Though the controllers are still in a prototype phase and likely to change, Valve released early versions to developers over the last few months and interest is high to see how they can be used to make virtual worlds more immersive.
Last month Denny Unger from Cloudhead, the studio behind The Gallery, shared some thoughts based on his hands-on experience with the controllers and over the last several weeks Climbey developer Brian Lindenhof has been testing the controllers in a variety of virtual worlds from both the Oculus store and Steam. I asked Lindenhof over direct message whether, even in this prototype state, he prefers Knuckles to the Oculus Touch or the Vive wands.
“Definitely the Knuckles,” he wrote.
The controllers fit around the palm of your hand and strap in snugly behind your knuckles. You pull a short cord to tighten the fit. Initially, Lindenhof noted the controllers could get slightly uncomfortable after a few hours and pinch his hand just a bit. Now he says he’s “grown more used to them” and doesn’t feel the pinching anymore.
“[I] regularly play with them until they drop dead now,” Lindenhof wrote. “Which is 3-4 hours currently.”
That is just one developer’s opinion at this point but that sort of rigorous use and preference for the hardware even in a prototype state bodes very well for Valve’s efforts to push immersion further than Facebook’s Oculus Touch controllers. It sounds like the current controllers are great for simulating the feeling of grasping and releasing objects with handles requiring several fingers, but pinching an object between just your index finger and thumb might not be ideal yet. In other words, it may be perfect for grasping a bow or a cup’s handle but a picking up a spoon from a drawer with just two fingers may not feel exactly like the real world.
The developer behind the Revive hack which lets people access Oculus store games with an HTC Vive headset reportedly also received the controllers, and Lindenhof has been using the hack in both Lone Echo and Echo Arena, two Oculus exclusive titles. He’s been recording his experience and thoughts at length on his YouTube channel and shared a few of the videos with us.
User interfaces in virtual reality start with your hands. We know that now with the Oculus Touch and the HTC Vive, but even when VR was simply a screen strapped to your head many felt that hands were the future. We began to develop The Gallery on the first Oculus devkit with the Razer Hydra (a Sixense technology) to deliver surrogate hand tracking and body presence back in 2013. And when Valve invited Cloudhead and the first wave of developers to see what would eventually be known as the Vive, Valve showed a commitment to that same vision. Now Valve has invited us and a new wave of developers to begin working with their latest prototype—the SteamVR Knuckles, a wearable VR controller that tracks not just your hand, but each finger too.
Back in 2014, we didn’t realize exactly how accurate SteamVR tracking was—the whole notion of roomscale VR was almost incomprehensible. Up until that point, there was still some motion latency in VR, so you never felt completely attached to the actions in your hands. But once the SteamVR Lighthouses started tracking objects in a 3D space, it was a deep and immediate connection of, “Holy crap, that’s actually my hand in VR.”
Our goal then was to deliver an experience where the player doesn’t have to think about the controller, and has only natural, gestural interactions. We wanted to demonstrate why this kind of input—your hands themselves—was meaningful. When we received our first Vive devkit (wired at the time) we were taping them to our hands in order to feel more immersed, and we even spoke to Valve about crude ways they could strap the controller on.
Those early Vive prototypes already showed an incredible level of fidelity, capable of measuring the tiniest fraction of a movement. It’s like the Moore’s Law of motion control; each incremental improvement in tracking brings with it new possibilities. So as soon as you have that kind of fidelity with your hands in VR, you need your fingers to be more purely represented. And that’s what the Oculus Touch started to do by bringing capacitive, gestural input to the controller.
Where Touch differs from what the Knuckles offer, however, is that you’re still pushing a binary button in the end; Touch feels more grounded in traditional gamepad design. Specifically, you always feel like you’re holding something with buttons—and that works perfectly for gun games and sword games. But the Knuckles take that further by removing the abstractions of first-gen VR inputs. Even though it looks like a more complicated device, it’s actually a much simpler one.
With the Knuckles, you’re not holding a controller; it simply straps to your hand and rests in your palm. If you relax your hand into a natural flex, the controller stays put and keeps tracking your fingers. If you reach out to grab an object in VR, your hand wraps around the base of the controller, giving a tangible feeling of grabbing something. That physicality is something you don’t get from data gloves, or vision based inputs without any device, and that feeling can then be fine-tuned with haptic feedback. Plus, you’re not passing around a sweaty data glove between your friends.
When reaching out to an object with the Knuckles, I’m not thinking about the controller I’m holding in my hand, because I’m not holding one. I’m not thinking about how to use my fingers either, because they’re not assigned to a button press. I’m not even thinking about my hand, and that’s where the magic comes in—I’m just thinking about grabbing the object, as I would in real life. That entire grasping motion is represented in VR, whether I pinch with two fingers, scoop with my hand, or close my fist around it. The Knuckles track your fingers by the distance they are from the base of the controller (your palm), and represent that movement in VR. It’s second nature.
As developers, when we receive prototype hardware like the SteamVR Knuckles, it makes us want to push the capabilities. In the past, that’s meant radically rethinking our stack of interactions and locomotion systems—virtually redesigning the game. We’ve written about what these kinds of changes have meant for The Gallery in the past, but the long story short is that new controllers like the Knuckles aren’t just affecting the complexity of interactions. We now have new possibilities for game mechanics and design that haven’t and couldn’t have been done before. It’s to be seen how these controllers will impact Heart of the Emberstone in September, but they’ll be a core focus in designing Episode 3.
Think of an interface-heavy app like Tilt Brush. Dials can be intuitive, but using your fingers is organic. There’s a possibility for gestural movements to call functions and navigate dense data; there could be an entire language built out of using your hands to manipulate paint brushes and pencils and sizes and colors. Once you take the mental load of an interface off the player—once they stop thinking about the controller—you can leverage that partition into experiential design and organic controls.
The kind of technology that the SteamVR Knuckles offer is not just impactful to the future of input in gaming, but also the future of output. I can go to a social VR space and point to something, or offer a peace sign, or tell somebody to hang loose without having to think about it. The controller doesn’t guess your gesture, or snap to a new position, it represents your fingers based on the distance it calculates. The more natural and intuitive the interface, the less we think about hardware. And the less we fixate on hardware, the more present we can be in VR.
Prior to the Knuckles, hardware developers were looking for something that would be more broadly accepted by the general public. Something that resembled a Wiimote, like the Vive wands, or something that when put together resembled a gamepad, like the Touch controllers, meant that VR input was familiar. Strapping an alien device to your hand in first-gen VR would have been too much too fast. But I think it took the evolution of those two controllers to get VR to the point where the public could be comfortable with the idea of a controller strapped to your hand.
There are so many moments in life in which using your hands is a vital part of the experience. There are implications for education and communication—with audiences who don’t generally understand videogame controllers—because the SteamVR Knuckles open the door to that broader audience. These are pick-up-and-play controllers where you don’t have to think about the input, you just reach out and interact in virtual space.
User interface in virtual reality starts with your hands. And once users are empowered in that way, and don’t have to be told how to use the technology, the next generation of virtual reality is here.
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This is a guest post not produced by the UploadVR staff. It’s a contribution submitted by Denny Unger, the Co-Founder, CEO, and Creative Director of Cloudhead Games. No compensation was exchanged for the creation of this content.
Less than a week ago new models of Valve’s prototype Knuckles controller surfaced in SteamVR Home. The device is an attempt to innovate in the VR space with controllers that allow you to grab and release in VR without being concerned with dropping a controller.
The key to the Knuckles controller is being able to freely manipulate items in a virtual experience without worrying about dropping a handheld controller while doing so. VR controllers, in their current forms, have straps simply because some people may accidentally have the natural inclination to release them when mimicking certain types of actions like swinging a sword or throwing an object. We’ve seen what the Knuckles controllers will look like and this demo shows off how they work.
There are sensors on the Knuckles grip that will activate individual fingers and the video starts off showing how, using your index finger and thumb, you can pick up something like a coffee mug in a natural way and then toss it across the room. We also get to see how we can hold an object in place in our hands using different fingers or use our open hands to spin a globe without having to press a button to interact with it.
This type of intuitive control is going to open up lots of doors for VR creators as long as Valve finds a way to get it into homes at a decent price. If you have a prototype and/or want to check out the demo and the source for the interaction, Zulubo has made it all available via GitHub.
Knuckles, Valve’s unique VR motion controller, is already in the hands of select developers who are no doubt designing ways to use the controller’s 5-finger tracking. In the video published by Zulubo Productions, we get a better look at just what Knuckles can do.
The demo, first seen in a Knuckles developer guide, is designed to let devs understand the controllers’ tracking capabilities, and what sorts of fine manipulation Knuckles provides users in a virtual setting.
With plenty of objects to suspend in mid-air with an anti-gravity machine, the demo lets you get used to picking up and manipulating physics objects with each finger, and use your individual fingers to poke at flat, screen-based UI.
To grab something, pinch your index finger and thumb together. You don’t have to click the trigger or touchpad, or even touch the controller. When both fingers contact the object you’re trying to pick up, you’ll grab it. You can also grab things using your other fingers against your palm, but this is difficult unless the object is cylindrical.
Using a single finger to reliably pick something up may not sound like a technical revelation, but it isn’t so much about what a few extra fingers can do physically, but rather about creating greater ‘hand presence’, or when your subconscious accepts the digital representations as ‘real enough’. Check out more about how Knuckles does it here.
Valve confirmed to UploadVR the company has progressed to sending developers prototypes of its next generation VR hand controllers.
This was to be expected but provides us with a rough sense of the advancements being pursued by the VR technology company. Recent updates from Valve, which partnered with HTC to create the Vive,
The controllers are being seeded to developers to gather their feedback, and only being built in a limited quantity in this version, according to Valve. The new controllers certainly look slim and ergonomic, and we wonder what kind of release timeline Valve has for them.
We know Valve is developing multiple VR games internally alongside the controllers, and exploring game design alongside these new interaction paradigms puts the company at the forefront of VR development with Facebook, Microsoft and Google.
While Valve is more commonly known as the company behind Steam, which is effectively the global App Store for PC gaming, the company also has millions of fans of its games like DOTA 2, Half-Life, Portal, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress. As a privately-owned company with a flat management structure, Valve also remains a bit of a wild card in the fast-developing VR ecosystem. Valve released its innovative tracking technology royalty-free, and is releasing a second generation that has potential to upend the market currently occupied by expensive cameras used to track VR headsets through warehouse-sized spaces.
Nevertheless, the Vive headset Valve partnered with HTC to make remains incompatible with content purchased from Facebook’s Oculus store. The Rift remains compatible with content purchased from both Steam and Facebook’s own Oculus store. There is a hack to work around the division on Vive, but that is far from direct compatibility with the Oculus store and makes using some of the Oculus-exclusive games difficult to access with HTC’s headset. The issue has been a frustrating one for early adopters who want to buy the best content available and play it on whichever headset they own.
This is relevant because Microsoft is soon to enter the fray with its own controllers and line of headsets, and Windows 10 is evolving to support Microsoft-backed VR headsets from some of its PC manufacturing partners. It is unclear where Vive and Rift will sit in the evolving Windows ecosystem even as Microsoft plans a push for its plans by the holidays this year. It should be noted Valve also partnered with Apple now and is bringing SteamVR system to Mac computers.
We will report back when we know more about the distribution and release plans for Valve’s new “knuckle” controllers. Let us know what you think down in the comments below!
Valve has lifted the veil somewhat on its Knuckles controllers, first revealed as a prototype last October at the company’s annual Steam Dev Days conference. In a blog post today, Valve showed off some specs of the Knuckles dev kit alongside a button-map of the device, revealing the controllers will have multiple capacitive sensors to allow for some basic 5-finger tracking.
Like HTC Vive’s motion controller, Knuckles is positioned in 3D space by Steams’s Lighthouse tracking system, but Valve has designed its prototype motion controller to offer a greater sense of presence than its ‘closed hand’ predecessor. By creating a device that clamps onto the back of your hand, Valve hopes to let users ‘let go’ of the controller while in use, allowing virtual objects to be grabbed and thrown naturally.
As an ‘open hand’ controller, Knuckles will also hone in on virtual hand presence by including a number of capacitive sensors, detailed today in a developer blog post. Located in different areas on the controller, these sensors, much like the ones in Ouclus Touch, will help detect the state of the user’s hands by sensing when your finger in on a button, or particular part of a controller.
Capacitive sensors are under each physical button including the trigger surface, outer face button surface, inner face button surface, and system button surface. There are also separate arrays of capacitive sensors in the controller’s grip, which is designed to enable grasp and un-grasp actions and determine which finger is resting where.
While this isn’t what you’d call ‘full’ finger tracking, which would ideally involve a way to calculate exactly where your fingers are at all times, the Knuckles controller is promising to provide a more basic tracking solution that can tell if your fingers are on or off discrete parts of the controller, like sitting on a button or curling around the grip. In fact, because capacitive sensors only allow for an on and off state, Valve recommends devs perform some smoothing when designing virtual hands for the controller to keep the finger motions from looking “too mechanical.”
It’s not ideal, but besides aiming to provide better hand presence, it also hopes to make social VR a little more human by allowing users to show natural hand positions.
image courtesy Valve
It also has a handy strap-tightening system that lets you fit the controller snug, and release with a single hand.
Some is sure to change before commercial release of the Knuckles controllers. Developers currently need to calibrate finger tracking, as dev units provide “very poor” tracking when operated in an uncalibrated state. Valve says however the need for an explicit calibration procedure “should be considered a temporary measure that will only be required for these dev-units.” Dev kits currently have a 3 hour battery life that draw current from a rechargeable 500mA battery, charging via a USB micro-B connector.
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