PS4 VR VACATION SIMULATOR FULL
PS4 VR VACATION SIMULATOR SIMULATOR

At its core, release timing is critical, but without physical feedback to a player it’s unclear exactly when they grab, so it’s even harder to tell when they release. Lack of resistance is a problem in grabbing, and it turned out to be a much bigger problem in releasing. It isn’t the perfect solution, and there might be a way to use the thumb in certain situations, it’s just not something we’ve solved yet in a way that didn’t introduce different problems. As long as people try to grab items naturally, this gives us just enough data to work with. Over time we determined that we would just use the index finger as our data point for grab and release. It’s very easy to occlude fingers, for hands to leave the tracking area, and for velocity to be high enough that no accurate data is available. Working on release gave us the clearest picture of just how challenging current finger tracking data is. We had to use as much data as we could to determine overall intention. Accidentally dropping an item you’ve grabbed is definitely frustrating, but so is trying to release repeatedly and finding an object still ‘stuck’ on your hand.

The penalty for releasing at the wrong time is high, even in a relaxed game like Vacation Simulator. This fixed a lot of the difficulties in grabbing without real world resistance. So, if you keep trying to grab the object by closing your hand more, you can succeed. We store how closed your hand was and re-check once it closes by a certain additional percentage. Let’s say your hand entered the grab area of an object and was just passed the threshold for grabbing it (that is, slightly too closed to grab the object).

Our solution was to introduce “ retry grab intervals”. With hand tracking you want the same thing, except without real world object resistance you don’t know if your hand is already in a grabbed state when nearing an object. In controller-based grabbing, if you hold the grab button and then come near an object it won’t grab (which makes total sense: you don’t want a closed hand to grab!).

PS4 VR VACATION SIMULATOR FULL

And again.Įven with all this effort, it wasn’t the full solution. Our solution was to create a custom “ grab threshold data”-basically, how much do you expect to have to close your hand-for every single object and interactable item in the game (which is many hundreds) and then playtest. But if you close your hand too tightly on an object and we don’t successfully register a grab, your finger colliders might actually push the item out of the way, as you feel no resistance. Instead, you have to think about what the players’s intentions are as a whole and then determine what other data you can utilize to make a better guess on what the desired outcome should be.įor example, if you are grabbing a small object you expect to have to close your hand more than if you are grabbing a big object (and even that is over simplified it also has a lot to do with shape and general grab orientation). You can’t just say finger curl is X therefore intention is Y. Not only is the finger tracking data with current technology at times very poor, the player’s intention is also not clearcut. While it technically “ worked”, it definitely didn’t universally feel good or work well for all types of objects or interactions.Ī big problem with hand tracking is that your input is muddy. That is, you either are grabbing or you aren’t grabbing-there’s no in between. After that, things got way more complicated.Īs for grabbing itself, our first approach was to map grab and release to a binary style input. Our first discovery was a good one, Tomato Presence (not seeing your hand when holding an item because the item acts as a stand-in) seemed to work just as well with hands as controllers.

For us it needed to feel natural and require no special gesture. The vast majority of hand tracking applications to date use pinches and laser pointers to solve the problem of “grab”. We could fill a small novel with all the lessons learned, but wanted to discuss a few of the most interesting aspects of development.

PS4 VR VACATION SIMULATOR SIMULATOR

In fact, Vacation Simulator wound up being the perfect proving ground for hand tracking: it revolves around direct hand interaction and contains almost every different type of grabbing, manipulating, and gesturing that you can think of. If you haven’t yet tried hand tracking in Vacation Simulator it’s available now for Oculus Quest and Quest 2. Bringing Hand Tracking support to Vacation Simulator was quite the journey-one we didn’t even think was possible at first! What started as an R&D project to enumerate why hand tracking wouldn’t (or wouldn’t yet) work ended up becoming a viable, shippable project-one that translated the entirety of Vacation Simulator into something you could play, end to end, with only your hands.

Ps4 vr vacation simulator