Owlchemy Labs' VR Hand Tracking Concept Demo Has Me Excited For The Potential Future VR MMOs
MMORPGs and Virtual Reality games have one major thing in common: they transport us to new worlds. VR does this by tricking yourself that you are physically in a new space, while MMORPGs do it through world-building, story, and the social relationships you make across the experience.
VR MMORPGs have been hard to come by — at least good ones — yet they aim to bring those two things together: transporting the player to a world they inhabit. Yet, VR has a massive barrier to entry: cost.
Getting around the cost factor, though, the act of interacting with the world around you can frequently feel gimmicky or one-note, especially when your interactions are tied to a game controller that serves only a few in-game functions.
However, during GDC 2023 earlier this year, Google-owned Owlchemy Labs showed off a tech demo of the hand tracking tech they are working on, and the possibilities of how this could apply to MMOs kept firing off in my head as I walked away from our meeting.
The demo itself was built using Owlchemy's most notable game, Job Simulator — though it should be stressed that this doesn't mean we'll be seeing a new Job Sim game. Rather it's a tech demo using the existing environment. That being said, the demo, running on an Oculus Quest 2, was transformative in practice.
«We really see hand tracking as the future of VR, right?» Owlchemy Labs' CEOwl Andrew Eiche told me in an interview at the Game Developer's Conference in March. Part of the reason why Eiche seemingly thinks this as it breaks down some of the barriers that keep players out of VR — the cost of the device and its accessories being one, as well as the simplicity of controlling the environment.
«The big thing here is if you want a billion people to use it,
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