A new motion controller designed for virtual reality gaming has appeared on Kickstarter. It's called the Trinity Magnum and hopes to bring the best FPS experience to users in VR gaming worlds. The firm behind the project, TrinityVR, says the controller offers comfortable and natural grip options plus precision aiming. Furthermore it isn't going to break the bank at its sub $100 price point.
A controller like the Trinity Magnum helps you feel more immersed in your virtual worlds by giving you "independent freedom to look and aim". This particular controller has been designed to work comfortably with either single or a double hand grip and to work accurately with broad or precise low-latency motion tracking.
The controller offers one trigger, two analogue joysticks, and four tactile buttons despite TrinityVR asserting that "VR is all about button minimization in favour of natural user interaction" – sometimes you need such controls for menus and so on which don't appear in our real world. For tracking it uses a combination of its internal inertial tracker and an optical camera sensor.
TrinityVR has chosen to give the user options depending upon what tracking cameras they might want to use with its controller. For example the "Trinity Magnum Developer Kit will support positional tracking for the DK2/CV1 Oculus Camera (expected), PSEye and Microsoft Kinect for Windows, as well as most webcams for laptops and desktops". The controller is also aiming to be platform agnostic and support development platforms such as Unity, Oculus and Unreal Engine and OSes such as Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
TrinityVR chief of strategy Rahat Ahmed told Polygon about the firm's pricing decisions "The important thing for us to say is look, you're going to buy an Oculus Rift for maybe $200 or $300… you're not going to buy an input device for the same amount of money, you're going to buy it for a lot less, like you would a PlayStation 4 controller. So we want to keep it reasonable and in perspective." In its time testing the peripheral Polygon says that it performed accurately and without lag.
The firm is looking for $60,000 crowdfunding and looks set to achieve this goal easily: over $11,000 has been raised with 29 days left. Right now you can still secure a Magnum Developer Kit from $80 (+$10 outside of USA postage). The device is expected to ship to backers by Xmas this year.
