It soon exploded and attracted a lot of interest, especially from publishers offering funding. I knew that with a bit of work and a few algorithms on top of the hand tracking, I could make it work.”Īcosta created a video showcasing the new prototype game and posted it to social media. “When I put on the prototype, it wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough for me to start polishing the experience. “It worked so well.Back in the day with the controllers was nice, but with hand tracking was exactly what it should be.” Acosta adapted his original prototype into something new, ditching controllers for something much more freeing and immersive. “Oculus just released the hand tracking system and suddenly it came to me like, ‘Oh my god, I could actually rescue that…prototype and try if it works using hand tracking.'”Įven in the early stages, hand tracking felt like a turning point for the previously controller-only experience. So I decided, at some point, to go back to my job.”Īfter continuing in Microsoft’s VR/AR division for another few years, Acosta revisited the concept in 2020 while bored at home during the pandemic.
And I didn’t have all that back in the day. You need a team of people handling all that music licensing. “The best thing it was that it made you feel like you were there.” But Acosta soon ran into a road bump - music games, and particularly the associated licensing, are complicated work. “I think that it was pretty good,” he says of the Rock the Stage prototype, of which videos still exist online. Acosta said he quit his job at Microsoft to work on the prototype, titled Rock the Stage, over the course of four months. This is something that we could actually turn into a game.” The original idea developed into something akin to Rock Band but for VR, using controllers and the first Vive headsets and Oculus SDKs. “As soon as I went back home, I prototyped something … and it totally worked. “And at some point I was like, oh, this is an interaction that could work in VR.” “I remember being in a concert in Prague and I was just like doing air guitar,” he recalls. “With the HoloLens 2, it was a bit better, but the lag between your movement and the hand was very big, for a lot of technical reasons.”Įven so, Unplugged was first conceptualized in 2015 - well before the advent of any modern VR’s hand tracking functionality. It’s just the hand, not the fingers.” Without full and reliable finger tracking, Acosta came away disappointed and skeptical. “On the first version of the HoloLens … you have hand tracking, but just like the blob. Controllers are great.’ And now I’m saying the exact opposite thing.” “At Microsoft, they are all about hand tracking, but I was like, ‘No guys, we need controllers. “When I was at Microsoft, I was like an advocate for controllers,” he says with a laugh.
Such strong commitment to this new form of input is a big call, especially for Acosta, who spent years as a hand tracking skeptic while working on the HoloLens team at Microsoft.
“I wanted to create something that worked for real. “I think that hand tracking is here for good,” he tells me. After speaking with Acosta in our virtual studio (full video interview embedded above), it’s clear that creating a polished and tangible experience was always the goal.
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