I was just reading about Oculus Touch, and apparently it has an ability called NearTouch, which can detect when a finger or thumb is close to a button but not quite touching it. How the hell can it do that?!

Well it seems that it works sort of like a theremin, but I'm not sure how that works either.

Adding to what HereForTheBeer has already mentioned, you, or better said your skin, is more conductive than air so it does affect nearby magnetic field lines.

An easy but crude example of this is what happens when you almost touch a plasma globe. You don't actually have to touch the surface of the glass sphere in order for the high frequency electric ark to flow towards your fingers, since it will slowly but surely detect an incoming field of decreased electrical resistance (an easy way out).

Wow you're right! The Touch controller can detect my finger hovering ½ cm over a button! I thought I had to touch the button for it to be detected!

It started way,way back and was called an x-ray machine.How does that work? How does a metal detector work? How does an airport detector work? None of them actually touch you,yet they work so my point being is this is not something new but just progress.

Yeah, but X-Ray machines shine electromagnetic radiation similar to light, but of a higher frequency, and then photograph it through the other side of an object. This really isn't the same as that.

My mom had a similar sensor that she used whenever I would try to sneak a cookie. "Get your grubby paws away from there!" ; )

Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

Near touch works just like no-touch. Just the other way around.

Meaning when I use ie. a smartphone or tablet (I don't own any, but sometimes...) either just going near that virtual button (about 0.5 to 1 cm) will trigger it (really fun typing), or I can push that fucking display until it cracks and nothing will register... depending on the day, time of day, diet, moon phase... I don't know.

That sounds really weird. Good luck with it.

Doesn't the switch and valves VR controls have something similar? I think it's bad for gaming to have these good controllers stuck to the entire VR system instead of being able to be used on their own like Wii remotes.

Well if you're talking about switch, that's a console, so how could its controls be used for anything other than that? And if you're talking about valve, I assume you're referring to the Steam controllers, unless there's something else that I'm not aware of, but I'm not sure how those are VR necessarily, and they can be used with other stuff, or so I'm lead to believe. And as for the Oculus Touch controllers, I'm nearly certain that they can be used independently from an Oculus Rift.

The VR remotes. There are other makers at the moment including microsoft.

The wii remotes could be used on the PC so hopefully someone has the Switch ones working for the PC. The problem was that useless devs never made proper games for advanced controls so they were underused. Even on the Wii itself some of it's features weren't used right.

That's because Wii remotes were never intended to be used on PC. They were made to work that way through some sort of ad-hoc crap, and in all fairness, I never tried it, but I don't think the development tools supposedly worked very well, because for one thing, I think Wii probably has some built-in API to deal with it to some extent, whereas on PC, I think it just worked sort of like TrackIR and gave an image with a dot wherever the IR light was aiming or something like that. Then the game developers would have to figure out what to do with that in some weird, indirect sort of way.

Anyway, the point is that they're not going to make professional games to work with something so unofficial as that. If they wanted to use Wii controllers then they'd just make it for a Wii console instead. Should they have been made compatible with PC to begin with, like how XBox controllers are? Sure, why not? But they weren't. And the reason that XBox controllers are might have something to do with the fact that they're made by the same company that makes the most popular computer operating system.

There was something really great made for PC even before Oculus Touch, and it's called Razer Hydra. But unfortunately, it was unpopular and discontinued. Then another one was supposed to be the successor of Hydra, and it was called Sixense Stem, but as far as I can tell, that one never even got off the ground. They've been developing it for the better part of a decade, and you can get a developer kit for it, which started out at about $300, and is now $5250! And it's still not available for general consumer use with any real games!

So I think Oculus Touch is your best bet anyway.