Sony brought a VR game demo to GDC this year that got a lot of people talking, myself included.
It’s known as The London Heist, and it’s interesting to study because it pushes players to use both of their hands (which are holding Move controllers) to interact with a virtual space in novel ways; holding a virtual phone up to your ear to hear the speaker more clearly, for example, or physically picking up a clip of ammunition with one hand and slamming it into a pistol held in the other.
Using two Move controllers as virtual stand-ins for your hands goes a long way towards cementing that elusive sense of “presence” that creates believable VR experiences, and Valve reportedly accomplishes a very similar thing with its SteamVR controller prototypes.
VR-curious developers who missed out on seeing it firsthand can now get a decent look at how the demo is designed (and, as a bonus, how players tend to move when wearing a Morpheus headset and dual-wielding motion controllers) in a YouTube video (embedded above) recorded at this week’s Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Expo and uploaded by YouTube user Brian Hart.