Change the World — Voice, hands and magic on Meta Quest and in real-life on Quest Pro
Aldin’s next update is coming on October 25th for Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest Pro (SteamVR coming soon) — putting voice interaction and handtracking at the center of the experience, with powers to change the world with just a word and wave of your hand.
Full hand-tracking support has been added and gestures combine with hundreds of voice commands that let you summon objects, change physical properties like making anything huge or tiny, super bouncy, animate them and play with magic physics in any way you want. You can even customize what gestures do — just by saying ‘when I snap my fingers create a butterfly’, or ‘when I clap my hands make objects weightless’. Combined this keeps Waltz of the Wizard one of the most extensive multimodal apps available for VR/AR, letting you interact so naturally it feels like real magic.
The update also includes a brand new mixed reality sandbox for Meta Quest Pro, showcased today at Meta Connect during Meta’s voice session, giving you magical powers in real-life!
Powers to change the world
At the heart of the update are new kinds of voice powers that give you abilities to change the virtual world to your liking, with a spoken word and wave of your hand. Hundreds of voice commands now let you control your magic particles, summon objects or even characters just by speaking their name; change sizes, your strength, your size, object physics properties like bounciness, weight or even pitch of audio to make characters sound squeaky. Voice magic is a groundbreaking feature that makes anyone able to make the experience their own, completely intuitively.
New activities and items
Not only can you unleash your creativity by changing various things in the world, but a slew of new items have been added, such as balls, hoops and targets that you can animate and arrange. The magic spells of the tower can also now be used anywhere, so unique powers like Puppeteer can be used to animate any object in creative ways. All of this combined can be used to create your own mini-games and all sorts of activities.
Area expansions
The Fortress, where you wage magical combat against interdimensional beings, have been expanded with new environments — along with a new procedural mode that lets you generate random levels. You are also able to use voice magic to customize settings like enemy health, speed and voices of enemies, make yourself invulnerable or faster, your magic attacks more powerful and a broad range of other modification options. These unique abilities let you customize gameplay to your liking.
The courtyard has been redesigned and enriched with a wide range of details, items, interactive environmental elements, casual mini-activities that anyone can enjoy, environmental details that act like they would in reality — dandelions you can blow on with mic input, flowers that you can pick the pedals of, and more.
Hand-tracking interactions and hands 2.0
The update includes hand-tracking 2.0 and makes the experience fully compatible, along with additional new multimodal features such as the ability to customize what effects it has when you do magic gestures like snap your fingers. All hand interactions have been greatly improved and optimized to take advantage of Hands 2.0, increasing reliability, precision and accuracy of interactions.
Meta Quest Pro
A brand new MIXED REALITY mode (Quest Pro only) gives you magical powers in real-life, with more planned including FACE- and EYE-TRACKING for magical interactions — continuing Aldin’s mission to design key VR capabilities natively into content to unlock the medium’s full power and show why what makes it different from any other in history.
We look forward to showcasing more leading up to the release!
