Kickstarter for the first Apple Vision Pro controllers has launched
UPDATEAugust 27, 2024:
The Kickstarter campaign has launched.
Startup Surreal is working on VR controllers for Vision Pro, but the potential audience for such a product will be very limited.
Apple Vision Pro is primarily controlled by eye and hand tracking, which makes it easy and intuitive to use. However, this input scheme lacks the ability for complex interactions and haptic feedback. And because most VR games are designed for controllers, few VR games have been ported to the headset.
Startup Surreal wants to change that by creating a pair of 6Dof VR controllers specifically for the Apple Vision Pro. Surreal Touch is the name of the announced product, which, like Meta's Quest Touch Pro controller, uses built-in cameras to track its position in space.
According to Surreal, it will be possible to use the controllers in either the headset's standalone mode or in conjunction with SteamVR streaming from a PC. For the former, app developers will first need to integrate the controllers' SDK into their Vision Pro apps, while for the latter, Surreal plans to provide its own streaming software called Surreal Link.
Two videos on the startup's YouTube channel show an employee playing Half-Life: Alyx (above) and Beat Saber (below) using Vision Pro and Surreal Touch.
Pre-orders will start soon and the price will be announced at that time.
A product for a niche within a niche
Surreal deserves a healthy dose of skepticism until it delivers the product.
On its own website, Surreal touts dubious numbers: 10-millimeter accuracy in positional tracking (which would be quite bad by today's standards) and PC VR streaming at 120 hertz (Vision Pro's upper limit is 90 hertz).
Since few developers will bother to integrate the controllers into their visionOS apps, they will likely be of most interest to the minority of Vision Pro users who stream PC VR content into the headset, which is a niche within a niche.
For VR controllers to be more effective, Apple would have to release devices of its own, and from what we know, that is very unlikely.
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