The darling of virtual reality enthusiasts right now, Untold Games’ Loading Human, is a first person adventure which is attempting to pave the way for compelling human interaction within virtual spaces. Its ambition we spoke about recently, as well as the game’s recent very attractive transition to Unreal Engine 4.
The Kickstarter campaign for the new title actually passed its $30k goal a couple of weeks back, but the team have just announced that, in addition to Oculus Rift, Sixense STEM and Razer Hydra support, backers of the game can also look forward to Virtuix Omni support too. It’s an enviable line up of supported hardware for sure, although I do worry that such a small team might struggle to find time to implement them all with the finesse demonstrated by their current user interfaces. We should find out for sure February 2015 when the early access backer tiers gain access to the game.
Focus on Storytelling
One of the problems with creating a setting for Loading Human is forming a believable universe in which to immerse the player. Countless games have hashed and re-hashed various Sci-Fi tropes over decades of gaming leaving a tough task for those wishing to be truly original in the space.
The Loading Human team are acutely aware of this and released a video to explain their approach to the storytelling challenge.
It’s a UNICs System!
As mentioned, Loading Human is positioning itself as somewhat of a game changer for virtual reality gaming. As we all know, human interaction with these virtual game worlds will be the key to user enjoyment. No matter how good your VR Headset might be at achieving a sense of presence, you still have to get things done in VR and a frustrating interface could be immersion breaking in the extreme.
To this end, Untold Games have released a short video describing their methodology behind their implementation of an ‘invisible’ interface. Using cues provided by the animation applied to your in-game hands, objects held and what you can do with them should be seamlessly and invisibly (i.e. no text required) communicated to the player. UNICS (Untold Natural Interaction & Communication System) is the cheeky monicker they’ve assigned this system, take a look at it in action.
We’ll keep you up to date on Loading Human’s progress and don’t forget, you still have 3 days left to back the project here.