There are as many kinds of VR headsets as there are proposed uses for the nascent technology. There’s the famous Oculus Rift, made of somber black plastic with thick foam padding. There’s Samsung’s white, bulbous Gear VR and Sony’s glowing, Tron-like Project Morpheus. There’s Google Cardboard and any number of other cheap paper eyepieces. But I’ve never tried on anything like the cartoonish pink box that is Cordon Media’s Pinć.
Last week I met up with the people behind Pinć (Pinch), an under development VR headset that utilizes Minority Report-style user interfaces opposed to the mostly gaming experiences we’ve seen thus far from the competition. There are also a few other big differentiators for Pinc: it doubles as an iPhone case, uses hand gestures tracked by the iPhone’s camera for input, and includes a full SDK for developers built on Unity. Pinć utilizes a wireless ring (or pinchers) on each hand that allow users to navigate with touchscreen-like hand gestures when tracked by the device’s camera. The experience allows for a much more intuitive controls familiar to touchscreen users and seems to make a lot more sense for immersive virtual reality than a controller or buttons used by other headsets.