This Clever Immersion Hack Makes VR Feel More Real – Inside XR Design

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In Inside XR Design we examine specific examples of great VR design. Today we’re looking at the clever design of Red Matter 2’s ‘grabber tools’ and the many ways that they contribute to immersion.

Editor’s Note: Now that we’ve rebooted our Inside XR Design series, we’re re-publishing them for those that missed our older entries.

You can find the complete video below, or continue reading for an adapted text version.

Intro

Today we’re going to talk about Red Matter 2 (2022), an adventure puzzle game set in a retro-future sci-fi world. The game is full of great VR design, but those paying close attention will know that some of its innovations were actually pioneered all the way back in 2018 with the release of the original Red Matter. But hey, that’s why we’re making this video series—there’s incredible VR design out there that everyone can learn from.

We’re going to look at Red Matter 2’s ingenious grabber tools, and the surprising number of ways they contribute to immersion.

What You See is What You Get

At first glance, the grabber tools in Red Matter 2 might just look like sci-fi set-dressing, but they are so much more than that.

At a basic level, the grabber tools take on the shape of the user’s controller. If you’re playing on Quest, Index, or PSVR 2, you’ll see a custom grabber tool that matches the shape of your specific controller.

First and foremost, this means that players’ in-game hand pose matches their actual hand pose and the feeling of holding something in their hands. The shape you see in-game even matches the center of gravity as you feel it in your real hand.

Compare that to most VR games which show an open hand pose and nothing in your hand by default… that creates a disconnect between what you see in VR and what you actually feel in your hand.

And of course because you’re holding a tool that looks just like your controller, you can look down to see all the buttons and what they do.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been using VR for years now, and I still couldn’t reliably tell you off the top of my head which button is the Y button on a VR controller. Is it on the left or right controller? Top or bottom button? Take your own guess in the comments and then let us know if you got it right!

Being able to look down and reference the buttons—and which ones your finger is touching at any given moment—means players can always get an instant reminder of the controls without breaking immersion by opening a game menu or peeking out of their headset to see which button is where.

This is what’s called a diegetic interface—that’s an interface that’s contextualized within the game world, instead of some kind of floating text box that isn’t actually supposed to exist as part of the game’s narrative.

In fact, you’ll notice that there’s absolutely no on-screen interface in the footage you see from Red Matter 2. And that’s not because I had access to some special debug mode for filming. It’s by design.

When I spoke with Red Matter 2 Game Director Norman Schaar, he told me, “I personally detest UI—quite passionately, in fact! In my mind, the best UI is no UI at all.”

Schaar also told me that a goal of Red Matter 2’s design is to keep the player immersed at all times.

So it’s not surprising that we also see that the grabber tools used as a literal interface within the game, allowing you to physically connect to terminals to gather information. To the player this feels like a believable way that someone would interact with the game’s world—under the surface we’re actually just looking at a clever and immersive way of replacing the ‘press X to interact’ mechanics that are common in flat games.

The game’s grabber tools do even more for immersion than just replicating the feel of a controller in your hand or acting as a diegetic interface in the game. Crucially, they also replicate the limited interaction fidelity that players actually have in VR.

Coarse Hand Input

So let me break this down. In most VR games when you look at your hands you see… a human hand. That hand of course is supposed to represent your hand. But, there’s a big disconnect between what your real hands are capable of and what the virtual hands can do. Your real hands each have five fingers and can dexterously manipulate objects in ways that even today’s most advanced robots have trouble replicating.

So while your real hand has five fingers to grab and manipulate objects, your virtual hand essentially only has one point of input—a single point with which to grab objects.

If you think about it, the grabber tool in Red Matter 2 exactly represents this single point of input to the player. Diegetically, it’s obvious upon looking at the tool that you can’t manipulate the fingers, so your only option is to ‘grab’ at a one point.

That’s a long way of saying that the grabber tools in Red Matter 2 reflect the coarse hand input that’s actually available to us in VR, instead of showing us a virtual hand with lots of fingers that we can’t actually use.

So, In Red Matter 2, the grabber tools contextualize the inability to use our fingers. The result is that instead of feeling silly that we have to rotate and manipulate objects in somewhat strange ways, you actually feel like you’re learning how to deftly operate these futuristic tools.

Immersion Insulation Gap

And believe it or not, there’s still more to talk about why Red Matter 2’s grabber tools are so freaking smart.

Physics interactions are a huge part of the game, and the grabber tools again work to maintain immersion when handling objects. Like many VR games, Red Matter 2 uses an inertia-like system to imply the weight of an object in your hand. Small objects move quickly and easily, while large objects are sluggish and their inertia fights against your movement.

Rather than imagining the force our hands would feel when moving these virtual objects, the grabber tools create a sort of immersion insulation gap by providing a mechanical pivot point between the tool and the object.

This visually ‘explains’ why we can’t feel the forces of the object against our fingers, especially when the object is very heavy. The disconnect between the object and our hand—with the grabber tool as the insulator in the middle—alleviates some of the expectation of the forces that we’d normally feel in real life, thereby preserving immersion just a little bit more.

Unassuming Inventory

And if it wasn’t clear already, the grabber tools are actually… your inventory. Not only do they store all of your tools—like the flashlight, hacking tool, and your gun—you can even use them to temporarily stow objects. Handling inventory this way means that players can never accidentally drop or lose their tools, which is an issue we see in lots of other VR games, even those which use ‘holsters’ to hold things.

Inhuman Hands

And last but not least…the grabber tools can actually do some interesting things that our hands can’t. For example, the rotating grabber actually makes the motion of turning wheels like this one easier than doing it with two normal hands.

It’s no coincidence that the design of the grabber tools in Red Matter 2 is so smartly thought through… after all, the game is all about interacting with the virtual world around you… so it makes sense that the main way in which players interact with the world would be carefully considered.

To take full advantage of the grabbers, the developers built a wide variety of detailed objects for the game which are consistently interactive. You can pick up pretty much anything that looks like you should be able to.

And here’s a great little detail that I love to see: in cases where things aren’t interactive, all you have to do is not imply that they are! Here in Red Matter 2 the developers simply removed handles from this cabinet… a clear but non-intrusive way to tell players it can’t be opened.

Somewhat uniquely to VR, just seeing cool stuff up close like it’s right in front of you can be a rewarding experience all on its own. To that end, Red Matter 2 makes a conscious effort to sprinkle in handful of visually interesting objects, whether it’s this resin eyeball, papers with reactive physics, or this incredible scene where you watch your weapon form from hundreds of little balls right in your hand.

– – — – –

Red Matter 2’s grabber tool design is so beneficial to the game’s overall immersion that, frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen this sort of thing become more common in VR games.

If you want to check all of this out for yourself, you can find Red Matter 2 on Quest, PSVR 2, and PC VR. Enjoyed this breakdown? Check out the rest of our Inside XR Design series and our Insights & Artwork series.

And if you’re still reading, how about dropping a comment to let us know which game or app we should cover next?

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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."
  • Torsten Balle Koefoed

    Man, I disagree on this one (currently playing RM2). Those grab tools are the most stupid, annoying, unimmersive design I’ve come across in VR. I’d 110% prefer “real” hands instead.

    • impurekind

      You are so off on this one that it’s not even funny.

      But, hey, opinions . . .

    • Mattphoto

      Made me feel very disconnected and it felt like an unnecessary layer of video-gameness. Like I have a hand grabbing a thing to grab stuff? why am I not just grabbing with my hand? The claws also look flimsy and unrealistic when lifting heavy things. Like it doesn’t look at all possible or realistic. then some things just felt like an excuse to be a part of the grabbers mechanic. Flashlight… just strap lights to my head like all space suits. Flares… meh. scanner… okay but i disliked a walking simulator where i’m scanning stuff 90% of the time to begin with.

      • JO

        Agree 100%. It’s clever, at best. But without a logical explanation, the idea is just silly. Why are we using these grip tools for everything when when we have perfectly good hands? They could at least offer some explanation as part of the story… “Everything is irradiated” “Space travel has weakened our hands” etc etc ..

        • Arno van Wingerde

          I think hands in thick spacesuit gloves – they should have made them look far more bulky/clumsy – are not all that dexterous, as anybody using thick gloves can testify. So, then a gripper with extra tools built in makes kind of sense.

  • I wholeheartedly agree with what you wrote down, Ben. And it should indeed work as a kind of standard for XR, at least when you have controller input. That might be the one thing that didn’t actually work in HLAlyx – holding controllers in your hand while looking at your empty hands. Controller-straps or Index-controllers help boosting the immersion here but still. Great article.

    • CrusaderCaracal

      vr furry alert

  • wheeler

    It’s not only a great design but also an indirect admission that motion controllers have a long, long way to go. This design removes much of the disconnect for the most basic kinds of vr interactions–things that you’d expect would be “solved problems” at this point, but that just tells us that motion controllers still stink for the most basic kinds of interactions. That’s to say nothing about the all of the different feedback problems modern motion controllers present and what it would take to move VR interaction beyond “coarse grabbing spheres”.

    Devs are always clamoring for platform parity and cutting everything back to the most obvious, basic motion controller design that is touch controllers, but in my opinion this is all half baked and I’d like to see much more experimentation. Unfortunately it’s not only a difficult engineering and human factors problem but there are also many entirely unnecessary constraints (like legal challenges that can take a niche product that is of no harm/challenge to anyone and make it disappear after a brief threatening phone call–see Rob Cole and Project Modular / Project Caliper). I was excited to see what Sony did with PSVR2 controllers but still want to see more.

  • impurekind

    Yeah, the controls, interactions, and especially the in-game representation of the controllers and grabbers in this game absolutely deserve to be highlighted and held up as a guide for other developers in VR. This game is just quality and polish to the nth degree all round, and it has probably the best and most intelligent “hand” interactions and associated stuff around that I’ve seen in VR to date. The developers here actually understand the still very present limitations of VR, particularly when it comes to controls, and have tried to overcome and work within them as best as they can. They’ve done so amazingly well.

  • Arno van Wingerde

    Great article! I really appreciate games more knowing what clever decisions were made that I was in many cases not even aware of. The article on Eye of the Temple was likewise fun!
    however, I do not think these tricks work universally, for one being in a space suit rather helps. Yes, this could be harness in a medieval setting, but in many settings it would not fit.

    • Ben Lang

      Honestly, I think people put far to much stock on keeping things ‘realistic’ in games at the expense of gameplay. The best games, IMO, almost always are designed around fun mechanics / game loops, then a premise is wrapped around those mechanics to give them context.

      If you do it the other way around (create a premise first), then your premise constrains your mechanics / game loops.

      In most shooters, people can jump their entire bodyheight, sprint indefinitely for hours, and drop 15 feet like it’s nothing. It certainly doesn’t ruin the game just because it isn’t ‘realistic’, but it vastly enhances the gameplay.

      It’s fine just to do stuff like that without any explanation because it just makes the game better, but if you really want, you can always find ways to explain away ‘unrealistic’ things so they don’t seem so jarring. The grabbers in Red Matter 2 are just ‘cool sci-fi- tech’ so they don’t seem so out of place. But even in a fantasy setting, you just make them ‘cool magic tech’ and nobody thinks about them being unrealistic.

  • Arno van Wingerde

    BTW: do we know whether there will be a Quest3 upgrade on RM “1” as well?

  • eadVrim

    I prefer virtual hands and are more immersive that these grab toys.

  • CrusaderCaracal

    So sick

  • Yeshaya

    How about something on voice input/controls? I can’t think of any games where you can actually communicate with NPCs via a verbal yes/no instead of selecting a menu option. Actually talking to these characters would be much more immersive than pushing a joystick up or down and pushing a button.
    Sidenote credit to Saints and Sinners for the first time I stumbled across a zombie, said “oh crap”, and then it turned and looked at me. THAT was immersive and also terrifying. More games should do that.

    Or maybe something on the Iron Man VR game design. Cool how the positioning of your hand controlled whether pulling the trigger engaged propulsion, beam weapon, or missles, just based on hand position without needing to switch anything else.

    • Zantetsu

      There is Dragonborn Speaks Naturally which is a mod to Skyrim VR that lets you say the dialog selection you want your character to speak instead of selecting it from a menu. It’s kinda neat but I wouldn’t say that it is a hugely awesome experience.

      One’s brain knows that the character they are talking to isn’t real so there is, at least for me, a resistance to interacting with it like a real person. I really don’t want to pretend I’m holding a conversation with an automata.

      It sounds like a great idea but for me it just kinda fell a little flat.

    • Paul Bellino

      No game has that as far as I know. Its so strange because that is a large untapped resource. We have mics why not use them for NPC communication. there was a demo on meta that I still have, and you can blow out candles and move fabric just by blowing into your mic. why has this not been used????

      • Yeshaya

        Only remotely close examples I can think of:
        Espire VR: when you sneak up behind an enemy you can yell “freeze” and they’ll surrender. However at that point you can just pistol whip them to knock them out so I was never sure what the benefit was.
        Assassin’s Creed VR: you whistle by pulling the trigger with grip released to make an O with your hand and putting it to your mouth. Which is a much more immersive way to whistle rather than pushing a button. But yeah actually real interactive speech would be amazing

  • JanO

    Great game and great article!

    Suggestion for the next one: Cosmodread.

    While I wish the graphics were on par with RM2, Cosmodread features a great gameplay loop & in-game tools that make the exploration more meaningful than most games.

    I also would appreciate an article about procedural environment generation and other gameplay elements that can be procedural in order to make every run feel somewhat different…

    Thanks!

  • alienwar9

    I am going to hard disagree with this. The grabbers in RM2 give a sense that you are distanced from the world, artificially disconnected from tactile direct interactions. I just got done with a session in the game. While the grabbers do help with button identification and inventory (frankly, the whole body inventory concept is broken when a known limitation of VR is close to camera limits and out-of-camera view tracking). They try too hard to directly emulate reality while ignoring that our brains already do a lot of the computational magic of immersion.

    An example of this was when I first started playing HL:Alyx. I was walking down a hallway and casually reached out to touch a wall with a pipe as I walked. The animations allowed the fingers to adapt to the shape of the pipe and wall based on my hand placement and for a moment my brain was telling me the shape and texture of the wall. It was filling in the gaps and provided a sort of kinesthesia/synesthesia sensation. I was truly amazed because I had never experienced anything like that in a game before.

    Manipulating door handles in HL:A was also intuitive and mirrored the hand position I would use in real life, which is contrary to RM2 grabbers. My hand would reach out to the horizontal handle with a horizontal grip and then rotate around the handle pivot.

    The mere fact that hand orientation matters in glove/hand avatars vs grabbers helps sell a sense of direct interaction and typical real world expectations of how we normally grab, move, and reach for things.

    But I also realize that a part of that interaction congruency is the ability to fully open your hand (which is why one of the first upgrades I got for the Quest 3 was Index-like hand straps). I do wish full finger tracking would become the norm, at least until gloves become defacto.

    Btw, I think the Meta game “First Hand” does an admirable job dealing with the lack of buttons for locomotion and interactions. I know some gloves have buttons built into the fingers as well.

  • Runesr2

    A lot of focus on old dusty news that few may care about.

    Where are the reviews of Resident Evil 4 Remake VR for PSVR2, and Tin Hearts for PCVR?

    Instead you continue focusing all the ultra-low-end mobile VR and MR garbage – do focus on the high-end elephants in the room, thank you.

    RoadToVR is doing a great effort trying to kill high-end VR these days. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

    PCVR should be your number 1 priorty. Did you see that Underdogs have same number of rating on Steam as the Quest version? And that Five Nights at Freddy’s Help Wanted 2 has similar number of ratings on Steam as Assassin’s Creed Nexus for the Quests? Is PCVR weak if you make the right content?

  • Paul Bellino

    Brilliant game was awe stuck by it the whole way through.

  • eadVrim

    I fell less immersion in VR grabbing these tools, it is like my virtual hands are occupied the whole time