[Released] KINERACTIVE - Set your hands free!

Feel free to ask any questions, and enjoy the videos and playable demos below


Store Link: https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#!/content/153144


WebGL Playable Demos

Buttons and Switches

Cockpit Demo (volume warning)

Car Demo

KINERACTIVE is a set of components which allow you to create complex Inverse Kinematic (IK) interactions by simple drag and drop methods. No programming or animations are required to set up high quality hand and foot interactions with the environment. Everything is done through the Unity Inspector and Hierarchy panels, allowing game designers, level designers, developers and artists to create immersive interactions with speed and ease. Now you can give your game that expensive AAA detail, without the AAA cost and time investment.

Create ‘VR-like’ hands for your first person, third person, or 2.5D game: Reach out and click buttons in a cockpit, or change gears in a car. Using no additional animations, pick up lanterns from the environment, strike enemies in specific locations to make the impact really connect, or aim your superhero’s palm based energy beam directly at enemies. Rotate door handles, press actual digits on a keypad, or hold onto walls as you peak around corners. Make hands move with gun recoil and much much more!

For VR platforms without hand motion tracking controls: use the KINERACTIVE framework to simulate the motion tracked hand experience. Look or aim at objects you want to grab, hold, press, hit or touch.

Turn complex controls into intuitive context based environmental interactions for your players: Your space ship might have over 100 functions - instead of mapping them out in ‘difficult to remember’ key mappings across the keyboard, you can use KINERACTIVE to create context based switches, dials and buttons. The player can simply look at them, and use one or two buttons to control the entire ship - with the avatar’s hands reaching out to press each button, to flick each switch, and to turn each dial. Not only does this make the game easier and more intuitive to play, it allows a complex PC game to become playable on game consoles and mobile VR, since extensive amounts of controls and functions can now work intuitively with a limited set of buttons on a game controller.

IK Platform Agnostic: use any IK solution you like. Unity has an excellent built in IK solution, however you are welcome to write your own, or use any of the ones available on the Unity Asset Store, now, or in the future. Swapping IK solutions can be done at any stage of the project with no additional changes required to the interactions you’ve already set up.

C# source code provided - allowing you to extend the current components.

 

KINERACTIVE is now available on the Unity Asset Store! https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/animation/kineractive-153144

 

KINERACTIVE 1.0 is LIVE on the Unity Asset Store!

It brings loads of changes and improvements, documentation and tutorials. Get your hands on it now!

 

Version 1.01 will be on the Asset Store soon! Here's a little preview of how you can now use multiple components on the same interactive object to make some pretty fancy levers or handles.

 

Update 1.1 is now being reviewed by the Unity Store, and will be out very very soon!

Walk around and touch things

 

Hey Tom,

This looks really amazing. The one aspect I really loved is that to give players the indication of interactability with objects. I mean, when you look at a button and player character holds his hand up, it really gives the impression of that button being pressable. It is a really interesting approach instead of making objects shiny, outlined, or things like that, and more intuitive.

I haven't bought it yet (where I live, US Dollars to my local currency skyrocketed), but I will in a few days, and I have a few questions.

Is there anything I need to do if I use Final IK? Is there any specific option to any other IK framework? Or would it be all the same if I were to use Unity built-in IK solution?

And most importantly, can I work with the hand position or finger selection for interactions? For example, I am not really a fan of using my thumb to press buttons, and I'd like to use my index finger. But for the sake of context, if my character's fingers were to be chopped up, could I, for example, use the pinky for that?

I glanced over the videos but I couldn't find answer to these questions. If there was and I missed it, I'm sorry for my lack of attention.

Then again, this is awesome and regardless of the answers, I'm going to buy it!

 

Hi Tansel, apologies about the late response, the forum never sent me a notification But I'm glad to hear you like the idea of this asset! You can also make things shiny or outlined if you wish. As it's all based on Unity Events you can essentially make an interactive object do basically anything. But I chose not to do outlines and shine because then I'd have to include a shader too, and I imagine that other people will be able to create better shaders than me But you are right, it's a lot more immersive when the hand moves to a "ready to press" position. Honestly though, I originally did it because without this, the hand movement made it looked the like the hands were slapping or punching the buttons LOL so I had to think of a way to move the hand more naturally

As long as Final IK is capable of following a transform (which by the looks of the videos it does this very well) then it will work. KINERACTIVE just moves around 2 transforms (one for left hand, and one for right hand) so really the IK system is doing all of the hard work. You would just have to set up Final IK to follow left hand and right hand transforms, and that's it. KINERACTIVE will move the 2 transforms around as set out by the interactive objects in your scene (buttons, levers, doors etc). That should let you use any IK solution you like.

Absolutely . Sadly though, IK doesn't control the fingers - it only extends to the palm/hand. To work around this I just use a few animations, and there are lots of good free ones on Mixamo (and if you use an Avatar Mask to isolate the fingers in the animation, it's very easy to get what you need from an unrelated animation). By default I included index finger pointing, thumbs up, grab, and palm animations in the package. If you have a pinky animation then, absolutely, you can set your buttons up to use the pinky. If you wanted to get really fancy you could even have a full keyboard inside the game, and each key would play the correct finger animation and it would appear to touch type like a pro - so typing keys on your real keyboard would be mirrored in the game keyboard with the correct fingers. It would probably take an entire day to set this up since there are 104 keys, but it could be done!

When I made this asset, I was hoping many people would use it to bring a rich VR experience to the mobile platform (so you could use hands in VR without hand motion controls), but perhaps there is no market for high quality VR on mobile phones - then again it's probably just one killer VR app away from becoming a big market
KINERACTIVE has outgrown this single purpose, and is now suitable for just about any game or simulation. A few people that have bought it have shown my their creations, and I'm very impressed at what they have done. I might consider making a "customer projects" reel trailer, because they are better at using my asset than I am haha!

But anyway if you have any more questions feel free to send them through to cleanshirtlabs@gmail.com . I check this email daily, so you won't have to wait 3 months for a reply this time

Trailer for v1.11

 

KINERACTIVE is 50% off for the first time! Grab it this holiday sale!