3. Controllers are a tricky beast.

The Vive’s controllers are new and unfamiliar: they do not feel like an xBox or Playstation controller, for example, and they don’t have a joystick.

Buttons on the HTC Vive’s hand controllers. The small squares on the tops and side are sensors.

Tilt Brush makes good use of the thumbpads for secondary actions, like increasing the brush stroke size (right hand) and rotating the cube menu (left hand), but people generally only find out that the thumbpads are useful by accident — even though Tilt Brush has clear signs sticking out of the controllers, pointing directly to the touchpad and saying what they do.

In Aperture Robot Repair, set in the Portal world, your controller is skinned and simplified.

In Fantastic Contraption, your controllers are wooden version of the real-life controllers.

Moreover, each game has the ability to completely customize what the game controller looks like. This is not simply a matter of changing button mapping, which most games can do today. This means you can actually change what the controllers look like in VR: they can look like guns, magic wands, horses, 20-sided die, entire life-sized houses — you name it, it can look like that. For the most part, though, apps tend to keep at least the general shape of the controllers, or a simplified version of them, with visible buttons in equivalent places to their real-world counterparts. The other common option, which is Oculus’ favorite, is using dummy hands.

In The Gallery: Six Elements, your controllers are gloved hands, with which you can pick up and use objects & weapons.

In The Gallery: Six Elements, you have two disembodied glove hands, with which the user grabs things. In the Gallery, the grab action is mapped to the side buttons — the only demo on my list in which the side buttons are used for a primary action. No one has instinctively figured this out, in part because you can’t easily feel the side buttons. Most don’t notice they’re there. Instead, they try to grab with the trigger or thumb, then think that either the controllers are broken, they’re doing it wrong, or that they simply can’t interact with things in the game.

Chunks uses the secondary small button to switch between controller modes. This is actually quick useful, but unusual — I didn’t notice it until someone else did a walkthrough.

In Aperture Robot Repair, you must click the touchpad to grab things at a distance. Most people ignore the huge blue blinking button the touchpad has turned into, and instead try to use the trigger, fail, and again assume the demo is broken, or that maybe they aren’t supposed to open those particular drawers, etc.

It’s also worth noting that long ray casting gets tricky fast, selecting or manipulating objects at a distance. Try easing motion-to-speed at long distances. Aperture Robot Repair solved this by having the controller ‘jump’ out of your hand quickly, rather like the hookshot from Ocarina of Time. Gaze-based selection can also work, but gets increasingly less useful at longer distances, too.

My coworker Dioselina Gonzalez pointed out that, given the fact that no controller tracks perfectly yet anyway, a small piece of visual, audio or haptic feedback is almost necessary to confirm to users that they are still being tracked. Make liberal, and consistent, use of them. Haptic and audio feedback in particular feel good and contribute directly to heightening the sense of presence.

In all cases like these, it’s worth doing a quick overview of the customized controllers, unless you want figuring out these actions to be part of the game puzzle.