Right now when it comes to tracking movements in virtual reality, there are controllers that are part of the setup as we have seen in demonstrations. However these controllers can hardly be called precision instruments, so if you were hoping to perform more subtle or delicate movements in virtual reality, they might not necessarily be the best solution.
However there is a project called the Finexus that aims to be a tool that allows more delicate motion tracking in virtual reality. The project was started by Keyu Chen, a graduate student at the University of Washington when he was interning at Oculus Research, and what the project does is that it attaches magnets to your fingertips which are then used to be track movements in virtual reality.
According to the project’s description, “By instrumenting the fingertips with electromagnets, the system is able to track fine fingertip movements in real time using only four magnetometers. To keep the system robust to noise, we operate each electromagnet at a different frequency and leverage bandpass filters in order to distinguish signals attributed to individual sensing points for localization.”
From the demonstration video (see above), it seems to work pretty well although we are detecting a very slight lag, but it is something that we reckon can be improved over time. The project has gained some interest due to Chen’s previous work at Oculus, but the company had declined to comment on it.
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