Introducing Experimental Hand Tracking! Play with your very own HUMAN hands!
Greetings, Humans!
We are very excited to announce the launch of experimental Hand Tracking for Vacation Simulator! Now, you can explore all areas of Vacation Simulator using your very own human hands on Oculus Quest and Quest 2.
Hand tracking is technically one of the most challenging things we’ve built and this project has been in the works for a long time. This has been a major undertaking for the team as Vacation Simulator is the biggest game to date to add full hand tracking support. The feeling you get when you see your hands fully represented and then be able to interact with the world around you is magical!
At its core, Vacation Simulator is about hand interaction. The large variety of challenges and interactions made Vacation Simulator a good and challenging candidate for hand tracking support. Everything from grabbing, tossing, pushing, pulling, twisting, poking, placing, teleporting, 2-handed interactions, eating, putting on hats and glasses, the list goes on and on!
This originally began as a R&D project to understand what would and would not work with the current state of hand tracking with the initial assumption that we wouldn’t be able to make it work. However, the team was able to solve difficult problems and came up with clever solutions that made us realize we could get this to a point where we felt confident people could enjoy it. We had to make changes to most major systems in order to make everything work with this new input type and while controllers are the easiest and more reliable way to play Vacation Simulator, it was important that we add this experimental hand tracking mode to push the limits of the technology to show the edge of what is currently possible.
Hand tracking development is still in its infancy, and there is so much room for improvement and innovation. We hope this provides a taste of future interaction paradigms. Stay tuned for a deeper dive into our development process for hand tracking support for Vacation Simulator.
We hope everyone enjoys this new way to play!
-Owls