The developer behind Cubism, Thomas Van Bouwel, shared a video showing an in development feature that will improve the accessibility and ease of use for those playing with hand tracking.
The feature, which Van Bouwel has jokingly dubbed as “force powers”, allow you to pull pieces through the air towards you with hand motions. This will allow hand tracking players to summon pieces to them when they are out of reach, instead of having to lean across to grab pieces.
working on some hand tracking force powers in @CubismVR for when puzzle pieces are just out of reach pic.twitter.com/M2PIMcDW4U
— Thomas Van Bouwel🔜#GDC2023 (@tovanbo) August 12, 2021
When playing with controllers, there’s already an equivalent feature that summons all the pieces closer towards you when you press a button. Without any buttons to rely on, Van Bouwel’s solutions lets hand tracking players make a “come here” motion with their hands to any individual piece, which will bring it flying across to your hand’s position. Even better, the tips of your fingers will light up with the color of the targeted piece, so you can make sure you’re selecting the right one if there’s multiple piece in the same area.
Even without this new feature, Cubism remains one of the best examples and implementations of hand tracking technology on Quest that we’ve seen so far. Back in June, we did a deep dive on the history of the game and Van Bouwel’s journey as a VR developer. Coming from a background in architecture, Van Bouwel made the leap to VR in 2016 and released Cubism a few years later.
There’s no confirmation if or when the new force powers feature will make its way to a Cubism update, but we do know that the game is set to receive a set of new DLC levels sometime in the future, so keep an eye out for more news soon.
