Let’s start with a short introduction.
The Valve Index Controllers are the new controllers soon to be shipped by Valve.
With these new controllers, Valve focused on enabling natural input, high fidelity hand
presence, and comfort in VR.
With its 87 sensors, it can track hand position, finger position, motion, and even pressure
allowing you to grab objects by squeezing the controller or making hand gestures like
the peace sign.
The most interesting design choice is that it has a strap that goes over your hand allowing
you to open your hands without dropping the controllers.
This allows you to realistically drop and throw virtual objects.
The Valve Index Controllers can be ordered in a kit with the Valve Index VR headset or
separately for 279 US dollars or 299 euro.
Just to be clear.
The Valve Index and Controllers can play any SteamVR compatible game straight out of the
box.
Developers do not have to change anything for it to work.
But if a game does not natively support the Index Controllers, the button mapping could
be wrong.
It’s like using Revive on the HTC VIVE to play Oculus Touch games.
Fortunately, Valve is providing a rebinding tool that I will show later in this video.
But let’s talk about games with native support for the Index Controllers first.
So to have the full Index Controllers hand presence in a game, developers need to add
these hands animations and interactions to their game.
Like these finger tracking hand animations that you can see here.
How do you know which games have full Index Controllers support though?
And where do you find these games?
Right now, the Steam pages do not make this clear.
So there is actually a list that our awesome community has made.
This list can be found on Reddit, which I will link in our description.
The games on this list are added based on developers specifically stating that they
have implemented or are working on Index Controller support.
It even links the source of where it was found.
However, I did notice that when developers say they support the Valve Index Controllers,
it does not mean that they implemented the full package.
Like finger tracking animations or squeezing.
For example, I tried PokerstarsVR and while it works with the Index Controllers with the
right button mapping it does not have any of the extra features.
Unfortunately, most of the games on this list are like this.
Thankfully there are some games that I tried that do have full Index Controller support.
For example A Township Tale, Climbey, Neos VR and Moondust of course.
I have to say, when they do work, it is a really fun experience.
I am guessing that developers are still working on full Index Controller support and more
and more games will be added over time.
So just be ready to have a little bit of patience.
I also think that Steam will have a tag that shows this support eventually.
At least, I really hope so.
While you are watching this video, please leave a like to show your support!
So what about the games that do not have native support for the Valve Index Controllers?
I have noticed here that games sometimes detects the Valve Index Controllers as Touch Controllers,
making some of the button bindings very awkward.
Like the A button of the Touch Controller would be mapped on the upper part of the joystick
of the Index Controllers.
Or you are not able to use the grips of the Index Controllers at all, instead, the grip
is mapped on the trigger button.
Thankfully, SteamVR has an easy to use Input Binding Tool.
You can access it by right-clicking SteamVR, then Devices > Configure Controller > Controller
Binding
Here you can find the games you have installed and if you click on one of those games, you’re
able to change the controller mapping.
Let me quickly explain what you’ll see.
Every game will have an Index Controller Legacy Defaults binding that its set on.
Now, just to make it clear, in some games, this does work pretty well!
If you click on edit, you’ll see all the controller bindings here.
I would not recommend replacing this binding though.
If you want to create a new one, you’ll have to click on “Create New Binding”.
And here you can rebind every button.
For example, if you want to change what the trackpad does, then click this edit Icon and
select what you want it to do.
All the buttons you see here are from the original HTC VIVE and Oculus Touch controllers.
You will basically put whatever the button on your old controller did on this new button.
Now, this might take some time to figure out.
I find it easiest to just go into the game and check what every button does.
If one button is not intuitive, I’ll change it.
Like I did that for OrbusVR here.
Most of the buttons were mapped quite well, except the trackpad and the thumbstick were
both used for smooth locomotion.
And as you can see here, the trackpad of the Index Controllers only goes up and down now
so it’s not really handy.
So I turned it off, except for the press.
I put a teleportation binding on it so I can use the trackpad now for teleportation and
the thumbstick for smooth locomotion.
One tip here is that you do not need to turn off the game to change this.
You can change the button mapping with the game on in the background.
Just make sure you save it after you’re done and you’ll be able to use your new
binding directly in the game.
There are also community bindings as you can see here.
These are bindings created by someone else and uploaded to the workshop, which is a great
little feature and would save you a lot of time.
I’m guessing that when the Index Controllers start shipping everywhere, we’ll see more
and more of these community bindings.
You can create one yourself too and share it with everyone.
It would be really helpful!
So yes, this is the current state of how you can use the Index Controllers.
I just wanted to make you aware that straight out of the box there might not be a lot of
games available with the full hand presence including tracking and squeezing.
And some games will not support the controllers at all straight away, for those to work, you
will need to spend some time to do some tweaking.
In the future, I hope to see more options in seeing which games support the controllers
fully.
It would be so awesome to see developers implementing the full Index Controllers capabilities in
the future.
I’m pretty sure that I’ll get those games earlier than games without this support.
What about you?
Are you looking forward to giving this a try or are you going to wait until more games
get support?
Let us know in the comments!
Also, tonight we will be live streaming a game with full Index Controller support, so
if you have any questions or would like to see what it is like.
Join us tonight at 9PM Central European Summer Time.
• A special thanks goes to artArmin and a special shout out goes to his Patreon page
– • Everyone, thank you all so much for your
support by watching.
• And as always VR on!