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Enhance your setup up?


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Hi All.

The engineering team has done some great work to improve the controllers over the last few months for sure but as we all know, there are limits to the current design so I wonder if anybody has had a look or tried one of these Etee controllers to enhance your VR setup? One of the reasons I'm not motivated to add a tracking face plate and base stations to my vanilla Cosmos (aside from the over the top asking price) is the old outdated 6 year old clunky design controllers you have to buy with it, let's be real about it their design is old and behind the times (sorry about the anti plug) and knuckles as an alternative aren't available in Australia and if you have a problem there are warranty issues even if you do find a way to get some. I don't know, maybe Vive has something in the works already but we'll never know until they are ready to talk about it company policy being what it usually is to those outside of the company so in the meant time, this might be a good addition t  your setup. Also to the Vive people on the forum what are your thoughts? I see there is a video "etee at the Vive Developer Jam 2020 London" so we know there is some knowledge and collaboration with the company to whatever degree. Unfortunately the video is crap it isn't informative at all it just has some canned music and a few people waving controllers around for a minute or so and doesn't tell you anything much better video here looks like the way forward. 

To any Vive people on the forum I'd be interested in your comments since they use Vive trackers at the moment.

Cheers!

Fink

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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@Fink - Bringing controllers to market is rather difficult - as a manufacturer takes a huge amount of effort and coordination to get SteamVR to then you have to get that added into the and then to boot, every single developer has to integrate your controllers into their project either natively or by updating their SteamVR/OpenVR plugin - otherwise you have to fallback to SteamVR's controller remapping which isn't a very elegant solution at scale. Designing a VR controller for mass market is no-joke and I applaud the Etee team for their efforts - what they're doing it not easy at all. That said, from an end-user prospective, it may not be something you plug in and it simply works - especially at launch. Since no other knuckles-like controllers have launched, it remains to be seen how software support will play out across the ecosystem. To have true native and optimized support for a controller requires you to see developer kits to hundreds and hundreds of dev teams and there is a financial component as well as it costs them dev hours to integrate and optimize. Piggybacking off SteamVR input in theory will help reduce the owance on developers but there aren't a huge number of real-world data points to actually judge how that works in the real-world yet.

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Hi @VibrantNebula

Thanks for your view and pointing out various aspects of the process of bringing a product to market as I'm sure most of us working for larger to medium sized companies are aware it is always a challenge fraught with difficulties but to be sure, if its profitable and in line with the organisation's strategy then it will happen.

My post though is not about" how" it is about which type of controller and when it might  become available. Also what everyone's thought's are on this "eete" controller (I've seen a few videos of it working well with Half Life recently) and seeing that Vive already has awareness of this tech e.g. the use Vive trackers with it and their attendance at the "Vive Developer Jam 2020 London" if it might be a direction they are moving in considering their competitors are making strident advances in that direction already.

Hey we've all invested a fair amount of money in our devices so far, aren't you interested in whether or not you're going to get hand and finger tracking for your device anytime soon as opposed to the old Vive controllers? If not what are the alternatives? I think it reasonable to ask considering out vested interest as consumers.

As for getting developers to all get onboard with new controllers ,well that never happens 100% anyway, just look at all the compatibility issues with the offerings on both Viveport and Steam, hopefully the new developments and investments for Open XR\VR standard will help with that going forward. 

Finally I understand, especially from previous comments made by "employees" on this forum that there are limits to information that can be given out due to NDA's and company policies but I must say that the more you can inform your customers the more you engender product loyalty and support going forward if we can see at least part to of the way ahead, it's a strategy that works well for other commercial entities and at the and of the day "secrecy sucks" from a end user perspective . Give me better control please 🙂

Fink. 

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@Fink - I shared my personal thoughts - what they're doing is really really hard and I'm super happy that they're trying to bring this to market. SteamVR is open enough ecosystem that I see it complimenting Vive devices. I'm a huge proponent of hand tracking and I personally have a very strong preference for hand tracking solutions that are not camera based but are electromagnetic based. I personally am not comfortable using the camera based solutions from certain other manufacturers due to the privacy loss. I was a really strong holdout on the virtual track-pads - I'm one of those people that had 3 or 4 Steam controllers. That said, I'm coming around to thumbsticks something hard, especially after playing Saints and Sinners, and so that would be my primary UX concern around the  Etee's. Thumb-sticks are much more important to me now that we have content that specifically optimized for thumbsticks but I'm open to other implementations of the virtual trackpad and these are really slick.

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