Games have been the pinnacle of invention for a long time. And why not, there is a lot of scope of ingenious ideas borne out of the games. Shooting games for one, has been the most popular form of game in the world. And now Ilium VR is working on a gun stimulant to make your pursuit more realistic.
About the Valve-powered Athena
This VR-centric gun peripheral is planning to use Valve’s SteamVR ‘Lighthouse’ tracking for its working. This would give the users some realistic weapon control and move over motion controllers and joysticks. Ilium has already began their crowdfunding campaign to make this gun peripheral a reality. Dubbed ‘Athena’, this will look like a futuristic assault rifle complete with game controls.
It is said to contain a realistic recoil action, ability to reload via pull-out/pull-in action as well as some standard button inputs. With the help of the ‘Lighthouse’ integration the sensors of the gun could relay information to the headset via laser beams and sweeps to map the game actions in the game.
Valve’s plan to make ‘Lighthouse’ royalty free proved to be successful. With more developers coming on the fore with different ideas, Athena is just the start. Furthermore, Valve has already licensed this to 300 companies royalty-free to increase its usability. With this the company is hoping to see a rise of new game VR peripherals which could make a gamer’s experience more interesting.
Athena is the first gaming peripheral to come across using Valve’s new feature. However, this is an ambitious project because there may or may not be market for it. Game compability and customer response becomes an issue for such add-on peripherals, as developers don’t feel the need of adding on several peripherals for different games. Hence third party peripherals have never been outrageously successful for others to take cue. Nonetheless, It is great to see such innovative concepts coming through. And hopefully we will get to see a lot in the future too.
