In 2016, 21st-century virtual reality really arrived. From cheap mobile experiences to exuberant desktop machines, if you wanted to dive into a virtual world, there was a way. But while the headsets opened up possibilities, the new breed of touch controllers are the virtual hands drawing you in. When you first don a VR headset you're transported to another world, but suspending disbelief is required to keep you there. With the simple wand-like controllers or joypads, that's pretty hard – you know you're using a controller on the outside rather than your hands on the inside, which drags you out of the moment. Once that happens, you then start noticing the pixels of the display, the pressure of the headset on your face, the growing motion sickness and the chance to lose yourself in virtual reality disappears. Now Oculus, the high-powered Facebook-owned VR maker, has brought out dedicated Touch controllers. They have buttons joysticks and triggers, but they also track movement in a 3D space – rotational, positional, depth and height – as you might expect. Then they go one stage further, detecting the very presence of your individual fingers around the controller. When you point, so do your virtual hands. When you lift your thumb, they give you a thumbs up. You can tighten or loosen your grip, and do so individually with your index finger, all while having almost as many degrees of freedom as your flesh and blood hands. Oculus Touch controllers marked by impact with a desk. It is so natural, so intuitive, that very soon you forget there are controllers, it's just whatever you happen to have picked up in your virtual world, be that a broom, a bottle, a can, a disk or, almost inevitably, a gun. This is transformative. While the view around you tracking the motions of your head tells your brain that you're no longer in Kansas, it is the almost tactile nature of doing things rather than simply witnessing them that makes you believe. When you're moving through a puzzle-based shooting world in Super Hot, where every twitch of your hands, face, body or head makes a difference, when you're picking out bullets from the air like a virtual Neo in the Matrix, or climbing up a rock face where every handhold is key, you're transported to another realm. The pixels of the display, the cable attaching you to a computer and the awkward feeling of looking like a prat fades away – until you hit something in the earthly plane, which is easier than you might think. And that's what VR needs to tackle next, the ability to move freely in space. For the holy grail of virtual reality – Star Trek's Holodeck – you're going to need something as good for your feet as the Oculus Touch controllers are for your hands. As attempts so far from giant balls to rolling floors show, when it comes to VR, feet are harder to cater for than hands – so sadly don't expect to be roaming the digital plains any time soon.
