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Haptic feedback systems have played a crucial role in making your virtual reality experience more immersive and intriguing. With further development to its existing haptic feedback, the company has detailed the arrival of a more advanced ‘buffered haptics’ feature on Oculus Touch Controllers.
Oculus has implemented the linear actuator haptic feedback technology to its Touch Controllers. The use of linear actuators allows for a much broader variety of haptic effects, improved controls and a faster response time.
Using this ‘buffered haptics’ feature will allow developers an even finer control of the controller’s haptic feedback technology.
Buffered and Non-Buffered Haptics
Image credit: Oculus
The latest Oculus SDK allows developers to configure the controllers with two approaches of buffered and non-buffered feedbacks. However, simultaneous use of the two is not advised by the company only to avoid any sort of unpredictable behavior.
The concept of non-buffered haptics is quite simple in itself. It just involves switching vibrations on and off at a particular specific amplitude (0 to 255) and frequency (160Hz or 320Hz). As per Oculus, it is “designed for simple effects that don’t have tight latency requirements since the controller requires 33ms to respond to the API call that modifies the haptics settings.”
On the other hand, buffered haptics cater to a more wider and complex range of effects and are also faster to respond (10ms). Oculus says buffered haptic feedback allows effects “such as patterning vibrational amplitudes around sine wave or tangent functions, panning the vibrations across controllers, generating a variety of low-frequency carrier waves, and more.”
Buffered haptics allow developers to fine-tune the vibrational amplitude between 0 (min) and 255 (max) as per the requirement and application involved. This means that while playing your favorite VR porn games, developers can differentiate several actions like pressing boobs, fingering the pussy holes and all other naughty actions using haptic feedback of different amplitudes.
Oculus has listed some of the effects that can be achieved by buffered haptics. This includes:
- Smooth sine wave vibration with a “buzz down” effect at the end of each wave cycle
- Vibrational panning across the left and right controllers, again with a “buzz down” effect at the end of the panning cycle
- Ultra low-frequency buzz, essentially a series of ticks at 64Hz
- A “messed up” low frequency vibration based on a chaotic formula that utilizes a trigonometric tangent wave function
We believe that the fine-tuning with this buffered haptic feedback controls will certainly add to the immersive VR experience.
what is buffered haptic?
The ability to deliver haptic feedback with vibrations of different amplitude in order to differentiate between different actions and other complex range of effects.
Nice little feature. I doubt it will be a game changer but it will be interesting to see what developers do with it.
I think is implemented properly, the buffered haptics can be really useful in fast action games which require instant movements and quick reactions… Will certainly make it easy for players to affirm the actions