It seems that the next Oculus controller could be a glove with light emitters, similar to those of the Touch, but with cameras included in the glove itself. In addition, they could present some prototype this Tuesday, even a new version of their autonomous viewer.
This past February ten, we told you that the executive director of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, was testing a number of new technologies in the research laboratory that Oculus he has in Redmond, Washington; one of them was a glove with tracking, which at that time still seemed like a test with high-resolution cameras to detect the reflective balls stuck on the glove. Everything seems to indicate that this research is still ongoing, now presenting Oculus this patent, entitled “Optical Hand Tracking in Virtual Reality Systems”. Describing a glove with an array of light emitters that would be tracked by some “imaging devices”, we imagine cameras.
The patent talks about two ways to use these ‘imaging devices’ in the glove itself, of which they could use one, or both at once. In both cases, the devices would be capable of taking various images and would have their own light source. One way would be for the device to take images of the skin of the hand, or fingers, to deduce the relative displacement of the hand to the glove. The other way would be for the device to take images of the outer surfaces of the glove, to deduce the relative displacement of this to the surfaces. We would be talking about internal and / or external cameras in the glove itself, with their own light sources, aided (or not) by cameras external to the gloves, which might not necessarily be Constellations.
The case of tracking the movement of the hand relative to that of the glove is described here
It seems that they tell us about multiple sensors-camera with its own light sources, in each hand. It must be said that, depending on how the fingers follow, the gloves could perform different movements of these, not only closing them, but separating them or making them rotate individually. We will have to see what the Oculus product ends up with, if it comes out with all these qualities, or even adds to the patent for gloves with anisotropic materials.
“We are working on new ways to bring our hands to virtual or augmented reality. Wearing these gloves, you can draw, type on a virtual keyboard, and even shoot webs like Spider-Man. That’s what I’m doing in the photo.”
It may be that we will have more data soon, since this Tuesday, April 18, is the Facebook F8 Developer Conference and there are rumors that they may present new technologies or prototypes. There is talk of a new update of its autonomous prototype “Santa Cruz”, which we have already talked about here, which could be called “Monterey” or maybe the name of another Californian beach, as has been the tradition in Oculus prototypes. As always, we will be attentive.
