The Valve Index is supposed to be virtual reality with no expense spared. The recently announced headset costs $999, more than twice the price of competing Oculus and HTC devices. That price tag gets you access to several premium features: high-quality headphones, an experimental super-fast refresh rate, and a wider field of view “for typical users.” But these are all effectively upgrades. If you’re looking for something completely new, the most exciting part of the Index might be its input system.

Valve has sent some Index units to reporters for preview. It’s still rolling out updates before the launch next month, so it’s too early for full reviews. But that’s okay right now — because, seriously, let’s talk about those controllers.

The Index uses the “Knuckles” design that Valve has been teasing for several years now. In some ways, they’re a lot like their HTC Vive and Oculus Rift counterparts, featuring a wide plastic tracking strip, a joystick, a small trackpad, a couple of face buttons, and a squeezable secondary input. But instead of having to hold them constantly, you strap the plastic “hilt” against your palms. And instead of just measuring touches and presses, each one uses 87 sensors to capture pressure, motion, touch, and optical data.

I played rock-paper-scissors with a robot and lost

The controllers’ strap setup doesn’t necessarily seem more convenient than other design styles, since it’s pretty easy to keep your hands curled around any light controller. But it gives the Index far more detailed interactivity than your average VR system. With the HTC Vive, you can move your hands and pull a trigger or squeeze a side button to indicate pointing or closing your fingers. The Oculus Touch controllers feature capacitive sensors, so when the system doesn’t sense your thumb or index finger, it guesses you’ve extended them.

The Index, by contrast, can tell when each individual finger is extended. It can tell when they’re curled loosely around the hilt without actually touching it, when you’re holding the controller normally, and when you’re squeezing extra hard. In one section of a Portal-themed demo called Aperture Hand Labs, you have to demonstrate a firm handshake with a blowhard executive robot. Another “test” makes you play rock-paper-scissors with a trickster bot. (The bot won.)

Shaking someone’s hand with the Index doesn’t really feel like a handshake, obviously. But it’s thrilling to have a whole new range of control options that mirror natural body movements. And the system works, albeit imperfectly.

The Index seems to map specific regions of the controller to specific fingers. While it reliably detects my thumb and forefinger, it sometimes does things like mistake my pinkie for my ring finger unless I consciously keep my hands in the right place. This might be temporary: the controllers’ padded straps make it easy to adjust their position and angle, and with time, I might settle into a good fit. But getting the “scissors” gesture required concentration — although I wouldn’t blame the Index for my defeat in Aperture Hand Labs.

The Index is doing a lot of guesswork with this system, and you might get more perfectly accurate results with something like a VR CyberGlove. But there are no mainstream VR glove controllers, perhaps because they have a lot of truly damning shortcomings. Gloves are difficult to fit; often sweaty and uncomfortable; and if they’re made of cloth, prone to becoming dirt traps. The Index’s adjustable straps wrap snugly around my small hands while leaving most of the skin exposed. They’re almost comforting at times, like holding a pair of worry stones. Conversely, old-fashioned buttons and joysticks offer more reliable input than you’d get with a totally controller-free hand tracking system.

It’s seriously disappointing that these controllers are exclusive to SteamVR — primarily the Index, although you can also buy them piecemeal for the HTC Vive. The Index is a niche, expensive device in an already niche, expensive category, and building game mechanics around its very cool advanced hand tracking would mean sacrificing access to a huge portion of the VR market.

And without those mechanics, the Index could be just another variation on today’s standard VR hardware design. Your avatar’s hands might move more realistically on the Index, but that would provide a mostly cosmetic upgrade, not a new way to interact with the world. For now, several games (including the well-known Vacation Simulator and Arizona Sunshine) support Index controllers. But of the titles I’ve played so far, only the Valve-sponsored Aperture Hand Labs feels really built around them.

Valve is supposed to be developing three major VR games, including a flagship title this year. Those projects present great opportunities to experiment with what the Index is capable of, and maybe the results will be so exciting that they’ll help create a new style of VR interaction. For now, I’ve still got a month and a lot of testing until the official release — so I can hope to try more exciting virtual handshakes, clenched fists, and finger pinches before launch.

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