Microsoft is seemingly gearing up for the feature by reducing the dependency on mouse and keyboard and instead focus on advanced gesture features. With the advent of VR technology, it only makes sense for us to make a shift towards a much more advanced and intuitive way of communicating with our devices.
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Gesture controls have already been in the market for a while but it has been predominantly used for flicking through channels, controlling the volume and other similar gestures. The more complicated ones like picking up a tool or pushing a button are yet to be accomplished on a large scale level. Microsoft is working towards creating gesture commands that are as easy as communicating with each other.
The team has been working on detecting the hand moments accurately and overcoming the fact that hand is much smaller than the entire body and that makes it relatively difficult to track. The very reason why VR headset like the Oculus Rift makes use of a hand controller. The new system by Microsoft will let you use a hand gesture to operate a virtual knob, poke a bunny and move a dial.
Furthermore, the company is also working towards eliminating the need for haptics feedback and also overcoming the fact that as we advance in VR it would eventually become difficult to trick the body into immersion. An excellent example by Eyal Ofek shows how recurring moments of the same nature can be used to trick users. Let’s assume that the user is building the blocks and to do this he would need to virtually stack up several of them. Instead of actually stacking several bricks the user might stack a single physical brick repeatedly. It is this logic that can be extended to many more complex use cases.
Now one would also be able to end a Skype call with a gesture instead of reaching out to an actual mouse. Microsoft’s Advanced Technologies Lab has been inventing ways in which developers could create tools for the common day to day functions.
