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Comment by rm_-rf_slash | Hacker News Reader

My only disagreement is with the "gloves" idea. I thought we learned from the Wii that motion controls without force feedback is anti-immersion. Imagine "firing" a 12 gauge shotgun and seeing considerable recoil in VR while your hands stay still. Without haptic feedback I'll have to rely on imagination for the full experience, which I thought video games were supposed to skip.

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I always thought that shooters worked well on the Wii - simple rumble force feedback gives you recoil, and the Wiimotes work great as pointers, because the pointing mechanism was closed loop. What they lacked was closed loop position tracking of the Wiimote itself, which is why we ended up with terrible waggle controls in games. Oculus Touch & the lighthouse system will be closed loop, so they should be significantly better.

My disappointment with Wii force feedback came with the very first game I played for it: Legend of Zelda. Happened when I swung the wiimote to swing the sword, got blocked, and my arm kept moving. Then it just became the gimmick waggle.

Pointing/shooting controls were all right, couldn't really complain about a mechanic that Nintendo's had since NES Duck Hunt.

Maybe they could make it so you have to mimic the recoil motion yourself, with your own hands, to fire your shotgun.

You would have to make sure to always turn the safety of your shotgun before putting it away, otherwise if try to quick-draw you will shoot yourself in the foot.

edit: grammar

"I totally shot him! The game didn't register the motion at all! This sucks. I'm getting the controller."

That's anti-immersive, too. When you fire a shotgun in real life, you don't have to do the recoil motion yourself -- you just pull the trigger, and the recoil occurs on its own.

Yeah, and unfortunately haptic feedback is even farther away in terms of emersion than VR.

I imagine we might possibly come close by using a some sort of full body contraption that would somehow stimulate all your nerves. But it would need to be sophisticated enough to emulate muscle movement.

But then that's fundamentally incompatible with motion controls. So you'd have to then create something that's able to detect and interpret nerve signals from the brain to such a degree it wouldn't contradict the VR Headset and Haptic Pod version of the world. Otherwise immersion would tank.

What we learned from the Wii is that those kinds of controls can move over 100 million console units. Seems people don't mind the lack of force feedback that much.

The Wii was a fad. Most people ended up just playing Wii Sports until they got bored. Remember how well games like Guitaro Hero sold? Does anybody even play them anymore?

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