Encounter Dinosaurs On visionOS Shows Value Of Light Interaction

Iron Man and Elf Director Jon Favreau attached his name to a couple experiences in headset over the years and they’re delightful explorations of light interaction.

In 2016, he sat down with me for an interview at the initial release of Gnomes & Goblins, saying “Nothin’ is going to come out and try to eat ya.” When I asked what I should tell my kids about the PC VR experience, he made it clear to my family: “Don’t worry, nothing scary is gonna happen.”

The app resizes to the player and you can be playful with the creatures you encounter, picking up a nut off the ground with Vive controllers and tossing it over.

Nearby a decade later, visionOS follows in the dinosaur footsteps of Dreamdeck for Oculus Rift in introducing players to the large creatures in headset. Encounter Dinosaurs, also headed by Favreau, sees a portal open from which a large raptor-sized dinosaur emerges. The encounter was first demoed with Vision Pro before release and has been available since launch of the headset last year.

There are two types of dinos in the experience, with the first being sized much more like that creature I met on Vive in 2016. The encounter in visionOS features interactions so light they don’t consciously register.

With the larger dino, you can absolutely watch the creature lock eyes. Or you can try and slap the big guy, choosing a more forceful interaction. The dino is animated with such fidelity, as its tail whips into your personal bubble seconds later, that you don’t notice even on multiple watches how scripted some aspects of this interaction are, even as the dinosaur scrabbles along the rocks to make an exit for the second or third time.

The story told in this introduction to Apple’s spatial computing platform is the same as 2016’s Gnomes & Goblins. “Nothing is going to come out and try to eat ya”, even if this time around one of the dinosaurs is big enough to snap at you just a little bit.

Even with impressively physical creatures like Dots running around on Quest 3, their animations frequently find themselves at odds with the physical environment. Their feet might seem to run across the ground for a few steps, but then they wiggle around and seem to teleport when colliding with a wall.

Encounter Dinosaurs carefully frames its portal into the environment so this problem never occurs. The creature basically only sticks its head and tail out of the portal, but the spatial intrusion is enough to feel like Dorothy let something pop into her room from Oz instead of walking through that doorway leaving Kansas.

A doorway leaving mixed reality for full VR is the exact mechanic explored by Stay: Forever Home on Quest, and the grinding video game mechanic you find within seconds of traveling to your virtual destination is immediately off-putting there, more-so than the creature’s occasionally awkward interactions with the physical environment. Vacuuming up a Dot’s footsteps from your physical floor is only marginally less grindy, but not being forced to go into a virtual environment to unlock things feels like a relief.

There’s a reason one of the best virtual destinations, Raptor Cliff’s from Walkabout, turns its dinosaurs into roadside attractions and architectural fixtures. It’s hard to make interactive characters. A visit to an Alien Zoo at Dreamscape Immersive on a large moving platform absolutely captures the scale of Jurassic Park’s iconic first encounter with dinosaurs, complete with soaring music, but Dino Hab on Quest 3 again suffers in trying to gamify dinosaurs.

What Gnomes & Goblins & Encounter Dinosaurs each understand about virtual reality is that our default interaction with an alien environment is far lighter and more nuanced than most creators make space for. Oh sure it’s neat to shape landscapes in No Man’s Sky or Minecraft, but we don’t have those superpowers in the physical world. It’s a great power trip and instantaneous creative outlet to reshape landscapes, but simply tossing scraps to a hungry creature that comes by every so often is an expression of something deeply human about our tendency toward curious nurturing.

It doesn’t take much more than human wonder to hold your hand out when you see a butterfly. If you accept that invitation with a literal open hand in headsets, you’ll begin to understand why light interaction is a powerful path to storytelling in headset.