Henry Stockdale, of UploadVR is at the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this week and interviewed Andrew Eiche, the CEO of Owlchemy Labs, creators of Job Simulator and other VR games:
Asked about the studio’s hand tracking focus and how Apple Vision Pro uses hand tracking as its primary control method, Eiche believes Apple’s system feels like “huge vindication” for Owlchemy’s strategy.
We had this similar pinch gesture in our previous hand tracking demo without knowing what Apple was going to do at all, so it’s great to see that we’ve all coalesced around this one interaction.
When we first tried the Apple Vision Pro, we were like, ‘yes!’ This is like what we have been hoping for in many cases. Making an app on a headset is difficult right now on every headset because you have to start from scratch. With Apple, you can use Swift UI. You can use all of these different tools to build an app to get the base layer. And then you add everything on top of it and it’s interesting. So yeah, it felt like a huge vindication.
Job Simulator first launched on Sony’s PlayStation VR in 2016, so it’s interesting to hear that its veteran VR development team independently arrived at a similar interaction scheme as Apple’s Vision Pro designers and engineers.
In addition to Job Simulator, Owlchemy Labs announced last month that it is also working on bringing Vacation Simulator to the Vision Pro.