Waltz of the Wizard hand-tracking hands-on: Magic in your hands

Oculus Quest owners can now wave their hands in the air to wield magical forces, play music on a xylophone by just pressing their fingers against an invisible instrument, turn dials by pinching their fingers together and move across large distances by pointing where they want to go.

Waltz of the Wizard from Aldin Dynamics was one of the first generation of room-scale consumer VR games from 2016 to work with fully tracked controllers. Now, it becomes one of the first games to adapt those features to Facebook’s open-air, controller-free hand-tracking system on Quest. Facebook rolled out v17 of Quest’s system software this week and with it the first Oculus-approved games compatible with the experimental input system. The latest update or Waltz arrives alongside The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets as the two become the first full games with the feature. While the latter is largely a stationary game, Waltz uses a “telepath” movement system and gesture recognition to bring the game’s magical playground to a completely new input system.