Description

Hand Physics Lab is an experimental project created and developed by Dennys Kuhnert at the Holonautic Studio.

This game allows to experiment VR in a different way by having full control of your hands and fingers to interact physically with your environment and many different objects, puzzles and experiences.

Design

Hand Physics Lab embraces a minimalistic cartoon design to keep the user’s attention on the essential. The performance limitation of VR mobile platforms also played a role to define the visual style.

Many classic games inspired the design of Hand Physics Lab which also share the minimalistic level design approach like Portal and Crazy Machines.

History

It all started in January 2020 as a weekend experimental prototype by VR developer Dennys Kuhnert. It happened very shortly after Oculus released the experimental hand tracking features on Oculus Quest. This was a big opportunity to jump on the hand tracking interaction system generalization for mobile VR headsets, experiment with it and get the precious feedback from the community.

The first video posted by Dennys on social media raised a lot more attention than expected and helped to realize the potential of this new way to interact in VR with just your hands and physical interactions.

After enough features and experiments were added, Hand Physics Lab was first released in Early Access for free on SideQuest on May 8, 2020. After just one month it reached the top 10 most downloaded apps on the platform. 6 months after the release it reached 100’000 downloads and was in the top 5 apps on SideQuest.

The feedback provided by the SideQuest community was very helpful to improve Hand Physics Lab in many ways and helped to make it the best possible experience given the limitations and compensate for the potential tracking issues.

Features

• 85 Levels with a 3 star system based on completion time, precision, etc.
• 7 Achievements
• 15 Sandbox setups
• Full hand tracking and touch controllers support
• 1st person view and 3rd person view
• Light & Dark modes
• Playable in sit mode or stand mode

COMPANY: Holonautic