How to make buttons in VR (2017)

[shultays]

Or don't try to make buttons tangible/physical objects. If your hand (or pizza paddle hand) is inside a button, highlight the button and then use trigger to "press" button. It is hard to press buttons you can't really touch

[prettyStandard]

While I agree, yes, you should opt to use physical buttons when possible, I'm not going to disparage solutions to any issues.

But also, to your suggested solution, having a button need to be interacted with in VR and a physical button is error prone and annoying. I know I use a button like that daily. I would rather just reach over and stab most of these buttons.

[scheeseman486]

That doesn't work when you have no physical button available, like with hand tracking. It also creates problems if there's other functions mapped to the trigger, like if you're holding a gun; does pulling the trigger still fire it?

[Steltek]

If you want a UI for pizza peel hands, the clear choice is flag semaphore!

I don't have VR goggles but I feel like someone will eventually come up with a successful Minority Report imitation. We'll all have very tired arms but that seems a fait accompli of VR stuff anyway?

[foxyv]

One thing I noticed from VR is that it is exhausting. Something about it just drains me. Even just sitting and using a joystick. This is aside from even the weight of the headset. Just having my brain process the vision part of it isn't super sustainable. I've found, flipping up the headset every 10-20 minutes helps a lot though.

I mostly play flight sims so I don't use the motion controllers or anything, but I can't imagine having to work all day in VR.

[nightowl_games]

Good article. Not sure why the box cast would fix the "paddle goes through the box" thing though, unless they are doing the box cast at the rendering Hz and the physics Hz is significantly slower - which makes sense.

I made physics buttons in Unity and they worked well. Key is the colliders on the hands need some special sauce to make them be real proper physics objects that don't collide into things. The SteamVR demo for unity is a great starting point for this.

[bvisness]

Tunneling can easily happen in any physics setup if things are moving fast enough - and with giant pizza peel hands, the rotation alone was causing things to move too quickly. And in general I don't think it makes sense to use a physics simulation for UI elements like that. You want the behavior to be as reliable and deterministic as possible, and that's easy to achieve without a physics sim for simple interactions.

[anilakar]

Flight simmers like using physical button boxes instead. It takes around two weeks to get used to the button locations even when they don't match the virtual cockpit.

A good old mouse works just as well and its microswitches give a nice tactile response.

[mrguyorama]

Even with VTOL VR, which is a flying/weapons simulator designed explicitly to be used only with VR controllers could really be better allowing you to map an actual stick and/or throttle. Keeping your hand "still" or aligned with no guide, ie just free floating in the air, is an awful experience. It's worse than that fad of using the motion controls of the Wiimote to drive a car, or that time kinect made you mime a steering wheel to control a car.

Microsoft Flight Sim seems explicitly intended for you to sit in front of your normal computer screen with flight stick and keyboard and mouse and just plop the headset on. It requires you to press spacebar before you can do anything if you start the game in VR. It's so stupid.