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Perhaps the hottest appointment at this year's E3 was a chance to try out the prototype Oculus Touch controllers. Such was the buzz around them that it took some persistence just to get my foot in the door. I'd been booked in to try the final Rift hardware (and very much enjoyed a slice of Insomniac's action-adventure Edge of Of Nowhere on it), but getting a go on Touch necessitated a favour from an old friend and a willingness to hang around Oculus' meeting rooms for an hour late on Thursday afternoon, the show floor winding down somewhere below and the time of my flight back to London creeping ever closer, while Sony's Shuhei Yoshida and Epic's Mark Rein made friendly small talk on the sofa across for me.It was worth it. The demo is extraordinary - almost as revelatory a VR experience as Valve's SteamVR suite - and the controllers themselves represent a new gold standard in virtual reality interfaces: better than Sony's use of twin Move controllers, better than Valve's prototype wands, and light years removed from the conventional controls of the Xbox One pad that will ship with Oculus Rift when it launches in Q1 next year. (Oculus' ebullient CEO Brendan Iribe, emerging from his meeting with Yoshida, told me that Touch won't be too far behind - the firm is aiming for a Q2 launch for the controllers.)
Before I get too carried away, a couple of caveats. First: both Move and Valve's solution are also very good, and based on the same basic principle - you grip one controller in each hand and both are subject to three-dimensional motion tracking, giving you two virtual hands with which to manipulate objects around you in virtual space. Move is a simple and effective solution for this which is already proven and comes at a low cost, both to players and to Sony - an easy win. Valve's wands feature scroll wheels (rather like those on an old iPod) with neat haptic feedback that are a good solution for tasks like menu selection.
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