Oculus had talked much about
‘Hand Presence’ with the launch of their Touch VR controllers last year, but
few games have implemented the controllers in such a way that truly deliver on
that promise. Combined with Touch, Lone Echo’s impressive procedural virtual
hands take Hand Presence to the next level. It is not something you would think
is particularly important when it comes to immersion in VR, but our hands are
our primary means of interacting with the world around us, and getting them right
in VR can make it that much easier to feel immersed and present inside of your
virtual body. Lone Echo developer Ready at Dawn has spent a considerable amount
of time on the game’s virtual hands, and have achieved hands-down the most
realistic looking implementation thanks to a smart procedural posing system
which adapts the grip animation to each object and surface based on a physical
model.
The robotic hands are not only
beautifully detailed, they’re also impressively functional. You can grab any
surface or object in the game, allowing you to push and pull yourself around
the zero-G environment with ease. Each time you grip a surface you will see a
unique arrangement of the fingers which lay upon the surface in an impressively
convincing way. Lone Echo turns that rule-of-thumb on its head with some of the
best arm inverse kinematics (IK) that we’ve seen to date. Together with the
procedural hand gripping, these systems drive added immersion in VR because it
makes it easier to feel as if the arms and hands in front of you are really
your own. Lone Echo & Echo Arena double down on this achievement by making
many of the game’s interfaces and interactions touch-based, with functional
virtual touch-screens rather than the all too often seen laser-pointer
interface.
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