The Trinity Magnum is a precision motion control gun peripheral. It is being designed by TrinityVR for the Oculus Rift virtual reality device. Trinity has recently put their new peripheral up on Kickstarter to fund it’s final push into production for developers.
At first glance, the Magnum look similar to a PlayStation Move Device. This is because it is designed to be tracked independently from the head-mounted display of the Oculus and it is tracked via camera. This is very similar to how the Move works.
Having this independent motion-tracking allows the user to look in one direction and fire in another. It is also designed to be used comfortably with two hands for shooting enemies in FPS games or piloting a spaceship. If you need to swing a sword or wave a magic wand, the Magnum will also be handy for one-handed operation as well.
The Trinity Magnum features the following:
- Mono (one hand) or dual (two hand) grip depending on application
- Rumble feedback
- One trigger
- Two analog sticks
- Four tactile buttons
There are not a lot of controls on the device because Trinity believes that VR favors natural interaction over using controls. This philosophy is accomplished by minimizing the amount of controls you need to worry about. One of the issues Trinity will be addressing with this Kickstarter is refining the layout for the buttons and analog sticks as well as weight balancing. This will allow them to get ready for a production run so they can send out these devices to developers (along with the SDK) by December.
The Magnum will support positional tracking for the DK2/CV1 Oculus Camera, PlayStation Eye (PS3 version), Kinect for Windows, as well as most webcams for laptops and desktops. This will make the Magnum very flexible in its use when it becomes available for retail.
As cameras get better with higher frame rates and resolutions, then the device will improve. Tracking accuracy, frame rate , and tracking area will all be improved due to the higher quality of the camera being used. This makes the Magnum somewhat upgradable in a sense – even though we, the consumer, really don’t have to do anything except get a better camera.
Development kits for the Trinity Magnum will cost developers $99. This will get you the devices as well as the SDK so that you can blaze ahead and start creating software. They are looking to raise $60,000 with this Kickstarter to support their final development costs and get these out to the development community.
So far, there is no talk of an actual retail release for the rest of us. However, Trinity has stated that they will keep the pricing similar for retail as it is for developers.
