Samsung’s ‘Rink’ Motion Controllers For Gear VR Look Pretty Great

A few days ago, Samsung shared a few items that they’d be showing on the floor at CES in Las Vegas. One of them, which barely caused a blip on the radar was the “rink.” It’s Samsung’s motion controllers for the Gear VR, something that is sorely needed for their mobile virtual reality experience.

If you remember, Oculus just shared that their own motion controllers, the Touch, will be delayed until the second half of 2016. HTC and Playstation also have their own flavor of controllers.

Have a look at Samsung’s rink in action below:

The video description translates to:

Samsung C lab development challenges ‘rink’ is Samsung VR and interlocking gears, hand-operated controllers. Hand operation via a sensor worn on the hand may move the virtual reality contents , you can click or drag. CES 2016 showcase scene of demonstrations scheduled in the arena rink, Meet video!

I’m looking forward to being able to pore through menus using the controller, which looks a bit like interacting with screens in the movie Minority Report. Photos of the rink, which are basically all that we have other than the video, show what it might be like to type on a virtual keyboard. Basically, it’ll do way more than a Wii controller will, even though Samsung looks like be positioning it as something similar (see the Tennis pose.)

So Samsung has gotten Oculus content to consumers faster with their Gear VR partnership, and now is preparing to get people used to using their hands in VR…perhaps before Oculus can, again. No other information, including price or ship date has been shared, but let’s keep our fingers crossed it’s sometime before the summer. We’ll know more next week.