Realistic hand interactions coming to VR thanks to VirtualGrasp

Swedish robotics maker, Gleechi, has shown off some innovative developments in virtual reality, that could see in game hands and fingers grip and grasp objects far more realistically. It's hoped that this would help improve immersion, through letting you grab things in game as you would in the real world.

As it stands, while hands in virtual reality are a great addition that can really make you feel part of the game world. However the way they often grab unrealistically, or snap into a pre-defined position can break that immersion for some people. Gleechi's VirtualGrasp technology looks to fix that, by making them interact far more realistically. [yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEKn_COI-GQ']

In its current state it makes virtual hands grasp cylinders correctly, or grip something thin and light with finger tips rather than a wrapped fist. As RoadToVR explains, this technology can even adjust the on-screen grip if you change where abouts on the object you are holding. That's just not present in other VR games at the moment, which tend to have a fixed grip position, which you snap into when you pull the trigger or squeeze the side-buttons on the Vive remotes.

The plan is to make this technology available to other developers, to improve the overall landscape of hand-interaction in virtual reality. The reason it might catch on is because none of the animations are hard coded. They are all predictive adaptations of the user's own physical form in the virtual world, making it much easier to interact realistically with all sorts of different items.

Although some developers claim that this isn't that difficult a technological achievement, it's quite rare in many games available now and for first time developers, something like this could be a god send.

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KitGuru Says: This sort of tech could become even more important over the next couple of months as Oculus' Touch controllers are released to the public for the first time. 

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