Valve’s New Knuckles VR Controller Supports All Five Fingers

Right now, the most responsive VR controller in the market is arguably the Oculus Touch, but it does come with a few issues. For one thing, it doesn’t provide support for individual digits on the hands. With Valve’s new VR peripheral called Knuckles Cap Sense, all fingers can now play a role in actually immersing the players in the virtual reality experience.

As of right now, the discussions and involvement in the new controller are restricted to members. However, tech publishers have known about Knuckles since October of last year, Ars Technica reports. According to the information that the publication has gleaned, support for all five digits in one hand is available, with independent tracking for the fingers.

The index, middle, ring, and pinky fingers will be positioned along the handle, with the thumb going to the thumb pad up top. The controller’s snug strap also ensures that moving the fingers independently is easy and without constraint, though, this is not really indicative of how the final product would perform.

According to the overview of the controller, a lot of the functions of the sensors relative to the digits will depend on the curling. That is to say, if the finger is pointing straight, the value is zero and once it curls around the sensors again, it returns to one.

“Each finger axis returns a curl value between zero and one, where zero indicates that the finger is pointing straight out and one indicates that the finger is fully curled around the controller,” the overview reads.

Valve has been sending samples of the device to developers and other tech experts to get some feedback on the device, CNET reports. So far, participation appears to be heating up, with many participants expressing admiration for the product. This would mark Valve’s latest attempt at entering the hardware space, following its own game box and joystick controller.