Surreal Touch is a Kickstarter-backed third-party motion controller for Vision Pro. The first batch of controllers began shipping in December (right on time), and early impressions are starting to roll out.

XR industry veteran Nima Zeighami is the creator of the Vision Pro Owners Club on Twitter, and backer #130 of the Surreal Touch Kickstarter, which raised $127,000 to fund the controllers. Zeighami was among the first to receive the production version of the controllers and kindly shared his impressions with us.

Image courtesy Nima Zeighami

The Surreal Touch Vision Pro controllers use on-board cameras to track their position and report it to the headset, similar to Meta’s Touch Pro controllers. An upcoming SDK promises to allow developers to build VisionOS apps that support the controllers directly. In the meantime, the controllers also include software for Windows which allows you to stream PC VR content to Vision Pro, making it possible to play SteamVR content with proper controller support.

Zeighami said a highlight of the controllers was the seamless PC VR streaming thanks to Surreal’s own streaming software. That includes the Surreal Link app on Vision Pro itself, and the Surreal Streamer app installed onto the PC.

It took just 10 minutes for the initial setup to play SteamVR games on Vision Pro with the Surreal Touch controllers, Zeighami said. “Surreal Link is maybe the best and lowest friction experience I’ve ever had with wireless VR,” he said. After the initial setup, jumping back into SteamVR content with the controllers took about a minute total. All-in all, Zeighami was impressed with the software experience.

“I can not harp on this enough: the real magic of Surreal Touch is the software experience more so than the hardware quality or tracking quality. Delivering a high-tech motion controller is a colossal task, but delivering a simple wireless VR streaming app that actually ‘just works’ is almost more impressive,” he said.

But the actual quality of the controller tracking seems to be another question. Zeighami said he was happy with the latency of the controllers, but not as much with the positional accuracy.

“[Surreal] claims less than 10mm positional tracking accuracy and less than 1° rotational tracking accuracy. While I didn’t really find any issues with rotational accuracy, I did have frequent issues with positional accuracy. I often found that the position was much further off than 10mm or 1cm, sometimes closer to around 10cm or in rare instances even more. This seems to happen in adversarial scenarios, where the controller may be pointed at a featureless plane like a plain white ceiling or a large reflective black flat screen TV that’s off. Or when the controller is held in a way where the cameras on it are blocked by something or pointed at my other hand or arm,” he said.

Here’s a look at Surreal Touch being on Vision Pro playing Vertigo 2 on SteamVR:

He compared the tracking quality to that of the original Magic Leap, which shipped with a magnetically-tracked controller.

“[…] Surreal Touch feels reminds me of Magic Leap 1’s controller. It works fine in most scenarios, but you can see it jitter and drift to an offset of a few centimeters pretty constantly. It’s perfectly fine for most apps and games but makes competitive games unplayable and professional creative tools unusable.”

For games with slower hand movements, Zeighami maintains the controllers work well. But for games with lots of fast hand movements, the controllers are likely to frustrate. Beat Saber was rendered nearly unplayable due to the controller’s tendency to lose position and drift far away from the player.

Tracking quality aside, Zeighami gives the controllers a thumbs up on build quality and feel.

“They don’t feel too heavy, and the joystick, buttons, and triggers feel great,” he said. Though he also noted some polish issues.

“Despite the mostly premium-feeling build, the engineering tolerances are not perfect, with the plastic on my left controller not aligning properly with the body, leading to a bit of plastic sticking out slightly rather than sitting flush. In addition, the grip triggers creak when pressed all the way.”

And there’s some missing details, like a lack of capacitive sensing which would allow the controllers to track which buttons or sticks the user is touching. Granted, most VR content doesn’t make use of this feature even on controllers that do support it.

While PC VR streaming works well Zeighami’s account, using the controllers natively with VisionOS (which isn’t designed with controllers in mind) is a different story.

Zeighami says you can activate a “cursor mode,” which allows you to aim a cursor with the controller so you can control Vision Pro’s interface. However, instead of working like a laser pointer (as most controller-based VR interfaces do), the controller seems to emulate a connected mouse, where the rotation of the controller is used to determine the direction the cursor moves.

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Further, there’s apparently no way to trigger the ‘Home’ action using the controllers, which means you need to reach your hand up to press the button on the top of the headset, or dangle the controller from the wrist strap and use your hand to do the VisionOS ‘Home’ gesture.

At this early stage there’s not a single native VisionOS app that actually supports the controllers. And Zeighami doesn’t expect there ever will be much traction on that front.

“Almost no developers on Vision Pro will support the Surreal SDK because owners of Vision Pro with Surreal Touch are a tiny niche within a tiny niche. SteamVR is really the reason this exists, so don’t buy these controllers expecting all the best Vision Pro games to start supporting Surreal Touch,” he advises.

Beyond being controllers for Vision Pro, there’s the possibility that Surreal Touch could become the defacto ‘open’ third-party motion controller for any number of VR headsets. That’s possible because the controllers are self-tracked using their own on-board cameras, instead of relying on proprietary tracking algorithms that tie most VR controllers to their respective headset. But the company has yet to release a public native SDK, which means that’s still a pipe dream for the time being.

One place where the controllers get a thumbs up (with no caveats) is their on-time delivery. We’ve seen more than our fair share of Kickstarter projects that ended up months or years overdue. For what appears to be the company’s first-ever product, their go-to-market execution was spot-on.

Image courtesy Nima Zeighami

Zeighami also mused on whether or not he thinks the Surreal Touch controllers for Vision Pro are worth it, considering the current $300 price.

“So what it all really comes down to is a simple question: is it worth [$300] for a pair of controllers just to play SteamVR games on your Apple Vision Pro? Yes, absolutely. This is more of a function of the Vision Pro than the Surreal Touch, but even 2016-era VR games on SteamVR when played on the Apple Vision Pro look better than all but the top-tier games on a Quest 3 […]” he said.”

“So this means that if you are the kind of person who bought a Vision Pro over a Quest, or you have both headsets and are looking to spend dozens of hours or more playing PC VR experiences like the superior version of VRChat, Half-Life: Alyx, Resonite, Boneworks, Skyrim VR, Fallout 4 VR, etc. then Surreal Touch is the obvious choice,” Zeighami said. “It’s not perfect, the tracking quality is below most other leaders in the market, and Surreal Interactive has a lot of room for improvement in the overall quality of their offering. And yet even with those issues, I still think it’s a great experience. Meaning, I not only think it crosses the minimum threshold for usability, I think that it’s a must-buy for anyone interested in experiencing the SteamVR ecosystem on their Apple Vision Pro.”

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • John Doe

    Who is this "industry veteran"?
    The controllers are clearly not working. Centimeters dirft? Who is this for?

    > It’s not perfect, the tracking quality is below most other leaders in the market, and Surreal Interactive has a lot of room for improvement in the overall quality of their offering. And yet even with those issues, I still think it’s a great experience

    This guy already called himself "VR expert" a decade ago. He was super positive about WMR controller prototypes.

    • Nima Zebrami

      Wow, the Windows MR controller prototype videos, that’s a deep cut! Thanks for following me for nearly a decade!

  • Michael Speth

    From the description, looks like a bad gaming experiece and expensive at $300 USD.

  • impurekind

    Sounds like they need a few more months of testing and tweaking and then they could be good to go. But the tracking and stuff definitely needs to be improved if they're truly to matter to anyone properly.

  • Stephen Bard

    Some of us don't care whether the controllers work well or not because we honestly don't believe that the ridiculously narrow horizontal and vertical FOVs of the AVP are acceptably immersive for proper gaming.

  • Sven Viking

    I wonder if they’ll get any trouble over the name? Touch is a common word that obviously shouldn’t be trademarked in a more general way, but it’s an interesting choice of product name for a VR controller that looks near-identical to existing Touch controllers.

  • Arno van Wingerde

    I think Meta offers something similar, but with vastly superior tracking and better manufacturing's as well as support for native games. I believe they throw in a headset which is not as great as the AVP but more comfortable. And it is free, resulting in a complete solution for 300 or so… a savings of about 3000-4000 on the AVP…

  • XRC

    Poor positional tracking breaks presence because hand proprioception goes out the window. If they can improve this critical aspect, it may be viable

  • psuedonymous

    A mere 10mm accuracy target is well below an acceptable level if if they did hit it, let alone if the controllers can't even manage that much. That's an order of magnitude worse than the Razer Hydra, for example. If hand tracking performs better than your controller tracking, then your controllers are fundamentally deficient.

    • Nima Zebrami

      Surreal Touch’s latency is much less than Apple’s hand-tracking! But the accuracy is worse. I think that trade-off makes sense for gaming use cases.

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      TL;DR: that 10mm accuracy is probably only "repeatable 6DoF positioning", not the perceived tracking precision during use, which depends on multiple sensor data, and usually improves over time with software updates.

      All VR controllers rely on a mix of sensor data for tracking. Usually a very fast integrated IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) that provides high precision 3DoF translational and 3DoF rotational data hundreds or thousands of times per second is the main source. But as the IMU measures these values only relative to itself, it takes only a few seconds for drift to occur. Therefore a second, absolute reference source is used to correct for this.

      This can be a lowres camera like the 400×400 nIR tracking cameras used almost everywhere, incl Quest and Touch Pro controllers, and very likely the Surreal Touch too. These offer limited resolution/accuracy, often only run at 30Hz or 60Hz, and add latency from image processing for room tracking. They are inadequate as the sole sensor, but work just fine in combination with the faster and more precise IMU to correct drift.

      The 10mm accuracy is very likely how precisely the controllers can reproduce a position in space based on the cameras, not the perceived precision during hand movement, which will be driven by the IMU. The controller position will not randomly jump around a few millimeters, because the IMU also compensates for the lack of relative precision in the cameras. The problem with the Razer Hydra was the use of a magnetic sensor for 6DoF tracking, which are very sensitive to minimal external changes and therefore by default much more jittery/jumpy than camera based SLAM tracking.

      So called sensor (data) fusion has been used since the early VR days to improve accuracy, and one of John Carmack's first contribution to Oculus was rewriting the firmware of the IMU used on DK1, making it pull data at a much higher frequency, drastically improving tracking. Unless the sensors are horrible to begin with, tracking accuracy can therefore often be much improved with software updated after learning how users actally handle the controllers.

      HTC/Valve had to update the firmware on the early Vive Wands where a data validity check introduced 6DoF tracking errors. They cross-referenced IMU movement data with lighthouse tracking, and rejected some seemingly impossible fast IMU movements when the 6DoF position hadn't really changed. But their (reasonable) speed limits proved to just be way too low, as seasoned Beat Saber players turned out to be able to twist their wrists back and forth much faster than they thought would be possible. One sensor fusion firmware update later the controllers with increased limits were ready for even more insane limb flicking speeds.

      • psuedonymous

        I am well aware of the use of sensor fusion. The problem for Surreal Touch is that existing fused SLAM + IMU systems (e.g. Quest) are already achieving sub-mm repeatability in real-world environments, and have been for years.

  • namekuseijin

    you're already using a pc to play actual VR games, so why not simply borrow existing controllers anyway?

    • Christian Schildwaechter

      Because all other availabe controllers require either being tracked by a (non AVP) headset, or the use of lighthouses, or only work with Meta headsets like the self-tracking Touch Pro controllers. Making the Surreal Touch the cheapest (or only) option for many not already invested into PCVR. At least until Apple launches the rumored official AVP support for PSVR2 Sense controllers.

      • Andrew Jakobs

        I can imagine the Meta pro controllers to be able to work without a meta headset.

        • Nima Zebrami

          They can’t. Quest Pro controllers are locked to Quest 2, Quest 3, and Quest Pro. They can’t even work on the Meta Quest 3S, let alone on a Vision Pro.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Of course they could, if Meta decided so. The Quest Pro controllers could work with anything that allows to connect them via bluetooth, if both Meta and the HMDs manufacturer cooperated on the used protocol. This would even be possible with all controllers that include IR LEDs to be tracked from a HMDs IR tracking cameras, which means pretty much all headset with inside-out tracking. The sole reason why Quest 1 or any other Touch controllers don't work with AVP is that Meta/Apple don't want them too, not some kind of technical limitation.

          • Nima Zebrami

            Correct, it is Meta’s fault indeed, they have blocked the ability for other devices to connect to Quest Pro controllers. As proven by Surreal Touch, Apple has no issues with 3rd party motion controllers supporting VisionOS, unlike Meta’s HorizonOS.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            It's not as easy as blocking ability to connect. I'm pretty sure you can connect the controllers to the AVP, BUT you'll still need drivers which can handle the protocol the controllers are working with. Just like the surreal controllers also need it's own SDK to support the features of the controllers.

          • Nima Zebrami

            That seems completely incorrect to me that you’d be able to connect the famously locked-down Quest Pro controllers to any non-Quest device, let alone a Vision Pro, but I’d love for you to try your hypothesis and prove me wrong.

            Surreal Touch is designed to be open controllers that can connect with other devices, they’re nothing like Quest Pro in this regard.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Other devices also need support to fully working Surreal Touch controllers.

          • Nima Zebrami

            Which is something Surreal expressly supports and has committed to supporting even further in the future. Meta doesn’t support any 3rd party usage of Quest Pro controllers.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            So the Surreal controllers work with the Meta Quest 3, HTC Focus Vision, Pimax Crystal, Pico 4?
            Of course Meta doesn't have a need to support other headsets as they have their own. Surreal doesn't have a headset, so they need to try to support as many as they can, but yet only support PCVR and Vision Pro (through their own SDK).
            Just like we had some hobby developers write drivers for the PS headset and controllers, it might also be possible for the Meta Touch Pro controllers IF somebody really wanted to.

          • Nima Zebrami

            No, that’s where your confusion comes in. Unlike PS Move controllers which were designed to connect to PCs over standard Bluetooth from launch day, drivers on another device are not enough for Quest Pro controllers. You’d have to hack the Quest Pro controllers to connect to other devices over standard Bluetooth before any drivers would do anything. Because the Quest Pro controllers are locked down by Facebook. Surreal Touch controllers are not locked down, and they can connect to other devices over standard Bluetooth.

            Again, feel free to try connecting Quest Pro controllers to another device if you’re so sure you understand what you’re talking about.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Bluetooth/USB devices announce themselves with a HID (Human Interface Design) identifier that describes their class and determines the protocoll used to speak with them. This is what allows mice, keyboards or gamepads to work across different platforms, but requires the OS to support that HID class with drivers, and for example iOS famously didn't support regular gamepads for over a decade, only licensed/"Made for iPhone" controllers. As Apple didn't allow any 3rd party drivers, companies worked around it by creating iCade controllers that announced themselves as HID keyboards, with special games then translating the key signals to joystick movements.

            The Quest Touch Pro controllers can connect to AVP as any HID device AVP supports. The problem is that there are only a few predefined HID classes, and there is none for 6DoF controllers yet. The Touch Pro controllers could connect as gamepads and map all their data to the sufficiently available controller axis, and rely on software to translate it, like iCade on iPhone. But that is of course a clumsy hack, the proper way is to provide custom drivers for any non standard HID device. Apple has apparently been working with Sony to make the PSVR2 Sense 6DoF controllers compatible with AVP this way, not only for gaming, but also as high precision input for visionOS, which requires tracking their IR LEDs from AVP.

            Ideally Apple will provide a device class specification that would also allow to connect other 6DoF controllers (with custom drivers) like Surreal Touch or Touch Pro, without requiring either games to use a custom SDK or connecting to the streaming PC, which is currently necessary to use Surreal Touch with AVP.

          • Nima Zebrami

            The Quest Touch Pro controllers can connect to AVP as any HID device AVP supports

            This is incorrect, it is not possible to connect Quest Pro controllers to any arbitrary Bluetooth device as an HID device as they are locked down.

            As I said to the other poster, feel free to try your hypothesis with Vision Pro and prove me wrong.

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Okay: "The Quest Touch Pro controllers COULD connect to AVP as any HID device AVP supports.“

            it is not possibleIMPLEMENTED (YET) to connect Quest Pro controllers to any arbitrary Bluetooth device as an HID device

            .

          • Nima Zebrami

            This is closer, it is THEORETICALLY POSSIBLE that Facebook could support this in the future. But it's so unlikely, that I'd bet money they will never do it.

            Let me know if you want to bet $1,000 that:

            1. Facebook will not update their Quest Pro controllers to open them up with a Bluetooth pairing mode that can connect to any arbitrary Bluetooth device as an HID.

            2. Facebook will not release at least one non-Quest SDK or Library that allows developers to add application support for Quest Pro controllers on a non-Quest device.

            3. Point 1 and 2 will not occur in the next two years from the time of this comment.

            I think it's a reasonable bet if you believe it's likely what you're saying will occur.

            If instead your argument is that someone, given enough time and desire, can hack these devices to work on a device that Facebook didn't originally design them to connect to as a proof of concept, that's obviously possible and is an uninteresting point.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            Not out of the box, but I wonder why the pro controllers can't connect to the 3s, and maybe community can get it working with windows as the controllers are bluetooth devices as I remember.

        • Christian Schildwaechter

          TL;DR: Nothing stops Meta from offering the Touch Pro controllers as the best cross-platform 6DoF controller for any XR HMD where the manufacturer allows creating drivers; so far they just don't seem to want to.

          In theory the controllers can work with anything Meta want them to work with, as they are self-tracking, with a massively overpowered midrange Snapdragon so Meta can run the same tracking software on its Hexagon DSP they also use on Quest. The controllers connect via bluetooth and could announce themselves via bluetooth HID as gamepads, mice, keyboard for general compatibility, requiring special driver support for use only as 6DoF controllers, as there isn't generic HID specification for these yet.

          If Meta wanted, they could sell them not only as device independent 6DoF VR controllers, but also as 3D or barcode scanners or carpenter measuring tools connecting to a smartphone app at Home Depot. The Snapdragon will include a Wifi modem, so they could even serve as 6DoF remote controllers directly connected to a WLAN router. Or WiFi SteamVR controllers for those looking for a more reasonable applicationm

          The question is only if Meta wants too. And for platforms like AVP of course also whether the platform owner wants to, as both have to work together on support for connection and protocol, at least until we get generic 6DoF profiles in HID and OpenXR.

          The chance doesn't seem great though, as the use of the Snapdragon inside Touch Pro hints that Meta's primary goal was to keep development costs low by reusing Quest tracking, while using a much cheaper SoC with a DSP and new tracking software could have significantly reduced unit costs. Which doesn't matter for a device expected to sell in low numbers, where the development cost will have a much higher impact. But of course they still could decide that opening these very capable controllers to other platforms and the required extra development effort is in their best/strategic interest.

  • Andrew Jakobs

    So in short, these controllers are just crap. Only positive is that it supports vision pro.

  • STL

    Why would I want to buy a Quest 3, controllers included, if I can buy some "not so good" controllers for nearly the same price? The irony.