Nothing spurs hard work and innovation quite like a surprise visit from your boss. Just ask the Oculus Research Lab team who, earlier this morning, received a surprise visit from Facebook CEO, Chairman and Cofounder Mark Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg documented his visit to the Oculus Research Lab in a post on Facebook and while any post from the Silicon Valley-made billionaire is worthy of your attention, this one in particular is worth checking out because it shows him wearing what look to be a prototype of an Oculus glove controller.
The caption that accompanies the image says that the gloves allow users to draw, type on a virtual keyboard and shoot webs like Spider-Man.
“The goal is to make VR and AR what we all want it to be: glasses small enough to take anywhere, software that lets you experience anything, and technology that lets you interact with the virtual world just like you do with the physical one,” Zuckerberg writes.
Sign us up, Zuck.
“Oculus Rift is already the best VR experience you can buy – and the technology being built in this lab right now makes me want the future to get here a lot sooner.”
While the post is a bit self-congratulatory (really, Mark, are you sure it’s the best?) the sentiment is one we can get behind: better virtual reality technology is close at hand, quite literally.
Lending a hand to VR development
Oculus gloves are great, but does that mean HTC Vive and PlayStation VR owners won’t get five-finger tracking in the near future? Not necessarily.
There's another company called Manus who are working on a solution of their own – one that we got our hands on at last year's GDC.
While Manus has an early lead in the race it seems like the race to full-on hand tracking is just heating up.
