Well, That’s One Way To Use A Steam Controller

Want a truly immersive first-person shooting experience? Want it to feel like your body is really in a video game? Try attaching a Steam controller to your head.

This creative proto-VR solution comes to us by way of Plasma Quark. He’s set the Steam controller’s gyroscopic controls to always-on and attached it to his headphones. The result? A rudimentary head-tracking setup, which he’s paired with mouse-and-keyboard controls. I’ll be frank: it looks hellllllllla awkward and painfully silly. Also just painful. But in some ways it seems almost kinda… smooth?

You might remember that I’m a pretty big proponent of the Steam controller’s motion control options. They go a long way toward alleviating aim imprecision in shooters when you’re using the controller. That extra precision—that last nudge in the right direction—paired with a mouse-and-keyboard? Sounds almost practical on paper, even as it looks cartoonishly absurd in practice.

I doubt this’ll spark an explosion of people finding fashionable ways to affix Steam controllers to their noggins, but I’m really enjoying all the outside-the-box thinking this controller has inspired. We’ve seen everything from great typing solutions to one-handed control schemes for disabled people. Now we’ve got a, er, no-hands option. They can’t all be winners, but I’m giving this one an especially large participation ribbon.

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