There's a campaign currently running on Kickstarter to fund a new kind of motion controller. The people behind the campaign asked for a meager $250,000. Instead, they got more than four hundred thousand—and that was just day one.
The hardware in question, called the STEM system, could be described as a combination of the Kinect motion sensor and the Razer Hydra motion controller (which the group running the campaign, Sixense, developed). Unlike the Hydra, it is completely wireless, and unlike the Kinect, it doesn't require a line of sight to work (since it does not use a camera). It is also compatible with all kinds of displays, including the head-mounted Oculus Rift, and the project page further boasts that STEM has "the lowest latency of any wireless consumer motion control system."
There's footage of the prototype in action in the clips above and in the pitch video below. It's still not a holodeck from Star Trek, but damn, it's close. Real close.
STEM System: The Best Way to Interact with Virtual Worlds [Kickstarter]
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