Immersive headsets continue to lift off company drawing boards, in the hopes of powering a new wave of virtual reality in the consumer space — whether it’s the Facebook-owned Oculus Rift, Sony’s Project Morpheus, Microsoft’s Hololens or HTC-Valve’s Vive, to name a few VR devices in the works (some others: FOVE, Razer… the list goes on).
Big bets are undoubtedly being made that the next wave of gaming will involve wearing something on your face. It looks very much like a strategy to reboot the otherwise rather moribund console market. Immersive peripherals offer the prospect of differentiating pro gaming from all that casual gaming being conducted on ubiquitous mobile devices — much like 3D movies offer a way for cinemas to compete with the stay-at-home pull of high end flatscreen TVs.
Whether gamers will find VR gaming to their liking — or just hideously nausea inducing — remains to be seen. The first VR games are just starting to be detailed. Design challenges abound. But none of that is putting off Dutch startup Manus Machina, which has been building a data glove input mechanism for use with virtual reality headsets since July last year so VR gamers will be able to ditch their joysticks.
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