Hacker News Reader

Comment by FergusArgyll | Hacker News Reader

I think their big advantage vs meta is no controllers, I also think that is an underrated advantage.

Meta has supported hand tracking since the Quest 1. It works fine but for many high speed action tasks (e.g., games), it doesn't work as well.

> It works fine

It's decent but I don't think I'd say "fine". Most games (if they support both) work a million times better with the controllers. I tried hand tracking in a number of games on the Q2 and found it very lackluster. We will see if the AVP is able to deliver on their promise but already from the demos they've done it seems way more responsible/reliable than what I experienced on the Q2.

It’s an advantage for passive entertainment but means the device isn’t a real contender for a lot of games.

Its not trying to be a contender for games. The price alone should make that obvious. This is a productivity device.

The Apple Store app offered to sell me a PS5 controller during checkout, so it clearly does support them, they're just not necessary.

It supports conventional Playstation/Xbox style game controllers, but it doesn't currently have any equivalent to the Quests motion controllers for spatial applications which need more motion fidelity or inputs than are practical with just hand and eye tracking. It'll be a struggle to port a lot of existing VR games over to it.

Well, it works by using hand-tracking using the cameras on the device.

Could it not still track your hands while holding the controller?

Could it not track the controller itself, even?

Perhaps, but a Playstation controller chains your hands together by design. The established standard for VR gaming is to have a separate controller for each hand.

There's also the question of how precise the hand-tracking is under pressure, moving windows around is one thing but keeping up with expert Beat Saber maps is another thing entirely.

I'd be astonished if Apples hand-tracking is good enough to handle something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sJQSy3KG-oQ&t=33s

It will be interesting to see some side by side comparisons to the Quest Pro which has both the eye and and hand tracking as well.

I was disappointed there were no controllers, even as an accessory since it means that most of the VR gaming catalog will never be ported to this awesome Vision hardware.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com