How Oculus Designed Its Touch VR Controllers

(upbeat instrumental music)

[Narrator] VR is already cool.

But to make it truly immersive you don't just need

your head in another world, you need your hands there, too.

These are the Oculus Touch, the company's brand new

VR imput devices and they makes something called

hand presence possible in VR.

Getting to this design was a process of more

than two years of smart thinking

and scores of prototypes.

The very first thing that you need in order

to bring your hands into VR is to have a perfectly

tracked solution.

Much like a headset has embedded LEDs

that a sensor reads and positions something in space,

tracks something in space,

they knew that the hand controller needed

to do the same thing.

The very early investigations hinged on how much space

do we provide to embed some infrared LEDs

and let the computer read these.

This is what it would look like if we made it

as easy as possible for the computer.

But, no one wants to hold two school bus size

steering wheels in their hands in order to do something.

And as that tracking portion shrunk, the question of

how it fit in your hand became something to explore.

Would something fit onto your hand?

Was is it something that you could hold almost

like a flight stick?

The main binary became is it something you're going

to hold or is it something you're going to wear?

When you wear something, it has the obvious benefit

of being able to just open your hand and it's there.

But getting these on and off left a lot to be desired

from a user experience perspective.

Now while all that debate was being had,

the decision of what to put on this area on the face

was going on.

What are they going to put here?

Is it going to be thumb sticks,

is it going to be a D-pad like on a regular game controller?

Here's an example of one thing that they tried

for the face of the controller.

It has an analog thumb stick much like one you'd see

on a conventional game controller.

But the more thinking that they did about this,

the more they realized that it wasn't going to work,

and why is that?

It's because your thumb swings out a lot more easily

than it swings in.

So if you have a centered thumb stick and you have buttons

on either side, that's not going to be comfortable

over long stretches of time.

So all this exploration really led to this,

the culmination of a lot of those decisions.

Once they got to this, the real design work could begin.

It has a small ring with all the embedded tracking on it.

It has a trigger here, and would eventually get one here.

But on the face, what you can see is going on is

that thumb stick is more to the inside

and the buttons are to the outside.

So from this, came what's known as the half-moon prototype.

This is something that was brought to the E3

Video Game Show summer of 2015.

This was really the first time that anybody

outside of Oculus saw this device.

The tracking is naked to the world.

You can see where those LEDs are.

And you can see how the thumb stick is beginning

to take shape.

You can see that secondary trigger is here.

And from here until now came some iteration

inside the company, and it eventually got us

to the finished product.

Now what's going on here is more than just having tracking

that you can't see hidden inside this ring

of infrared translucent plastic,

and it's more than having the finished triggers

and the finished input buttons and these thumb sticks.

These buttons, this thumb rest, and these thumb sticks

all register when your thumb is on them.

The triggers register when you're pressing them.

So through various permutations of having your thumb

on something, resting away from,

it lets your hands in virtual reality

give thumbs up, grip things, and that's the kind of thing

that actually gives hand presence.

It's not just are my hands open or are my hands closed?

It's giving your hands a set of discrete actions

that helps you translate the thing you're

trying to communicate into a VR surrounding.

So you're talking about two-and-a-half years

of design thinking, and it all culminated in this,

the Oculus Touch.