Anush Elangovan is the Founder and CEO of Nod, which produces the Nod Gesture-Control Ring. The Nod ring exposes motions, gestures, swipe, and tactile feedback and enables user interactions ranging from tap, double tap, swipe up and swipe down. Anush says that he started Nod because he saw that touchless interactions & gesture controls would bring about a new computing revolution paradigm.

Nod was showing a demo at GDC that used the nod ring in virtual reality as an input controller. It was a simple and intuitive interaction to interact within a VR environment, but it also felt like the latency was pretty high. Anush says that the extra latency was likely due to also broadcasting their demo to a screen so that others could see the VR action at GDC, and that their benchmarked latency is around 7.5ms per packet via Bluetooth.

The current price of a Nod ring is around $149, which seems a bit high. But it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on in the future as the VR input controller ecosystem evolves, especially for the mobile VR experience. Nod is integrating with OSVR, and so it could have a pretty straight forward integration with VR experiences through the OSVR SDK.



At GDC Nod also announced the Nod Backspin controller, which combines motion, gesture, touch, analog and haptic feedback. They had an early prototype on display at GDC, but didn’t have any demos with it yet.

Finally, Anush sees that reality and VR will blend into a mixed augmented reality where it may be difficult for our perception to discern what’s real and what’s augmented. In the end, he’d like to see Nod play a part in helping to capture human intention through various gestures and pointing behaviors.

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