Hands-in-air interactions in VR I agree lack the tactile feedback necessary to avoid it feeling hollow. However, I've often advocated that the "ideal" VR input

Hands-in-air interactions in VR I agree lack the tactile feedback necessary to avoid it feeling hollow. However, I've often advocated that the "ideal" VR input system in 2019 is: - Freely tracked dominant hand, used for fine-grained control/pointing, expressing body language, and grab/release-like mechanics (which work decently for certain kinds of virtual objects/interactions, like throwing stuff) - Tracked 6dof controller in non-dominant hand, similar to the existing controllers except with a fully capable twiddler-like button grid for doing fast symbolic entry. For anything where tactile feedback is core, move it onto the controller hand, where the hardware buttons can provide a more reasonable proxy for things like press-and-release or sustained-holding in terms of motor interactions. (Haptics are still pretty bad on all other accounts, but controllers at least give you pressure feedback under your finger tips, instantaneous response, etc.) With the above setup, I suspect you could perform most knowledge worker oriented tasks with similar efficiency to a mouse and keyboard, and also perform existing VR-centric use cases like 3d modelling/manipulation, avatar locomotion, full body social interaction, etc. The current two-controller or dual hand-tracked paradigms fall short on the former. With the introduction of hand tracking capabilities on Quest coming, it seems that we're inching up to mainstream VR devices having the capability to deliver this, except the controllers still lack anything close to keyboard-level discrete inputs. However, once Quest hand tracking launches, it may be possible to use an off-the-shelf twiddler for this if the SDK exposes the ability to track in-hand tools (similar to the Leap Motion SDK.)