Ease Not Accuracy

VR can be incredibly immersive, but it can also be incredibly clunky. Despite having ‘direct’ head and hand input into the virtual world, there’s still several layers of abstraction separating players and the world before them. Thoughtfully designing the ways in which players interact with the virtual world is key to not breaking those magic moments of immersion. In order to do this, you’re better off helping players do what they intend to do, rather than responding to input as a perfect simulation, says Stormland’s Lead Designer, Mike Daly.

“Much like controlling a character in a [non-VR] game, we found that the [interactions which feel best] aren’t the ones where the game literally honors the inputs one-to-one, but instead intuits what the player is trying to do and helps them do it. This is most apparent when picking things up—[Stormland doesn’t] get too picky about having [the player’s] hand close enough or the right orientation; we generally try to make the interaction work in as many circumstances as possible.”

Easier said than done, of course. While in a non-VR game it’s, for instance, straightforward to define a radius around an object within which a player can ‘press X to pick up’, helpful mechanics are much more challenging in VR because of the breadth of player agency.

“Since we tried to keep so many of the game’s controls as intuitive in-world interactions, that meant detecting unambiguous and intuitive gestures. This was harder than we thought as each player interprets the position or motion required to perform an interaction slightly different. You have to consider all the different conditions under which players might want to perform the gesture,” Daly explained. “For example, you can toggle [the scanner] by tapping the side of your visor with your index finger. The variety of positions, orientations, and speeds at which various players attempted this gesture was quite surprising, and our first several tries at detecting this gesture didn’t register at all for some players.”

For Stormland, understanding player intent meant building invisible logic into the game to represent both the actual position of the player’s hand and the ‘intended’ position of the hand in order to make interactions look and feel good. Insomniac provided Road to VR with a glimpse of these systems in action:

If you’re not sure what’s going on here, Insomniac explains:

“This shows debug information showing what is happening under the hood when you interact with a world object. There are two spheres that control the boundaries of your hand transitioning from your controller space to the object space as well as an additional sphere that shows the real world location of your hand’s controller position. It also gives various information on data variables that drive the animation of the hand.”

“The best place to put your polish is where you expect players’ attention to be,” Daly says. “In many cases, this is the hand-to-world interactions. These interactions are worth the effort to make them look and sound as good as possible because of both the player’s attention on them and the frequency & regularity at which they occur. The time when it’s passable [in a VR game] to have objects blink into your hands or your hand snap between poses is behind us.”

Continued on Page 3: Cultivating the Past, Creating the Future »

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Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • Observer1

    Very similar to what’s Valve is doing (from listening to their door interaction talk). I guess all the AAA VR games will have this kind of interaction system where different animations are played based on which object is being interacted with. Interestingly, this is a contrast to fully physic based interactions in a game like Boneworks. Make me wonders if most indie VR studios will have to do fully physic based interactions simply because they don’t have the resource to do all the interaction animations.

    • very interesting point. I wonder if anyone has released a pseudo-game-ready physics based interaction system for VR indie devs, since it seems like something that could be vital to the future of indie development.

  • The Bard

    Just a silly shooter, nothing new.

    • victor

      like we need another freaking shooter game

      • Andrew Jakobs

        Yes… There’s never enough freaking shooter games..

    • CURTROCK

      Just you crapping on EVERYTHING Oculus does, no matter what….nothing new.

      • The Bard

        Not true, at all. I support Oculus actions like Oculus Start, Oculus Quest. Rift S is a misunderstanding, low spec, too late thing.
        I just like productions like Apollo 11 HD, Batman VR, Vader Immoortal (although too static and too low spec). Be fair.

    • Hivemind9000

      Getting a little reductive there grumpy. It also has stealth mechanics, environmental navigation/climbing, flying etc. Nice graphics too.

  • Greyl

    I was hoping this game would have been like Metroid Prime, but it seems quite generic, instead.

    • Metroid: run around tiny corridors shooting ants

      Stormland: Fly through large vistas and stealthy annihilate robots.

      Not dissing Prime, I love that game, but as for VR, I’ll take the vistas. thanks.

      • Greyl

        Pretty sure you haven’t played a Metroid or Castlevania game in your life if that’s your description of Metroid. Either that or you lack the ability to discern the intricate differences between both game’s design loop beyond surface level action.

  • ahem…. SPACE?!?!? I didn’t ever hear about SPACE?!?!?!?

  • Wick

    I hope that the test level seen on page 2 will be accessible in some sort of extras tab in the final game. It’s really cool when you get to mess around with certain things in a safe environment, like how Defector’s test levels are more fun than the rest of the game.

  • Wildtz0r

    Far Cry VR o/

  • I love these series detailing what happens behind the curtains!

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