What The Car? Triband’s Game Is One Of Apple Vision Pro's Best

"What The Car?" is available now from development studio Triband in Apple Vision Pro headsets following joyous releases from the studio in VR, iOS and other platforms.

We awarded "What The Bat?" our 2022 VR game of the year because of just how quickly it put a smile on your face and kept it there. The studio also explored simplifying interactions for silly comedic effect in "What The Golf?" and "What The Car?", as well as multiplayer game "What The Clash?".

Now with the Apple Vision Pro version of "What The Car?" Triband's developers head into mixed reality from mobile. What they've done here is absolute magic. Before this, I'd never seen a title that handles equally well in both hand tracking mixed reality and on mobile phones. Now I have, it's called "What The Car?"

"Our games are always made with many different hardware targets in mind (like iPhone, PC, and Apple TV). This makes it easier to design and optimize for different input schemes. But... it's always hard work getting it just right. With the spatial version of WHAT THE CAR? we wanted to create an experience that was even more silly and I think we succeeded,", said Peter Bruun, game director on the spatial version of the game.

"What The Car?" spawns a large virtual view screen into the middle of your living room with a wheel hanging off the front of it. If you make a gripping gesture with your hands the wheel automatically moves into your grip. Triband's solution to open-air hand tracking not giving you anything to actually feel against your fingertips is something others have toyed with as well. Here, if you change the distance between your hands (as is easy to do without haptic feedback) the wheel in your grip simply changes size to match the distance. As a game player, this tool means you have a way to point the car's direction. Then with the thumb–index finger pinch gesture you have your gas pedal.

What Triband is doing here is a bit mind-melting because the core concept of each of their games is that you basically play a bunch of mini games in which you do everything except what you expect based on the title. Put another way, you shouldn't expect to drive a car normally in "What The Car?" And yet? You kind of do.

They've abstracted the game's controls down onto phones and then back onto headsets such that they have zero simulated locomotion for the player's head to make them uncomfortable. The movement that's typically uncomfortable in full 3D VR is abstracted into comfortable 2D on the large virtual screen in the middle of the room. Meanwhile, control is moved into a comfortable 3D wheel in your hands. The result is that navigating this game's overworld ends up being remarkably similar to actually driving a real car. Ultimately, that's just one more layer of silly.

Other titles on Apple Vision Pro have done some impressive things with hand tracking and gaze-pinching, like Resolution Games' Gear & Goo making tower defense work well and the delightful little Minesweeper-like Puzzle Sculpt from Schell Games.

On Horizon OS-based Quest headsets, we've seen incredibly interesting room-scale mixed reality concepts like Laser Dance coming to early access later this year as well as Hello, Dot. These efforts, though, have found developers pressing the absolute limits of environmental recognition systems, with occasional hitches or regressions in those systems causing dramatic effects for players. Meanwhile, these games are also geared toward active get-up-off-the-couch gameplay.

Like "What The Bat?" did in 2022 to earn our pick as best VR game of the year, Triband in 2025 is meeting players where they are in Apple Vision Pro. The studio essentially made Job Simulator for your commute, turning the entire premise of driving a car on its head for absolute playfulness available wherever you sit.

It was a wild moment to realize "What The Car?" was available on my iPhone after I played it in mixed reality with Apple Vision Pro. It was wilder still to open the title and see it pick up exactly where I'd left off. I played half a level on my phone to verify controls work as well as they do in headset. They do, and then I closed the app. I refuse to finish my playthrough of "What The Car?" on my phone because it was a bit more fun in mixed reality.

Mixed reality games will improve as Horizon OS and visionOS mature. Right now, though, "What The Car?" is already one of the best in mixed reality for the exact same reason its predecessor is one of VR's best – meeting the player where they are and engaging them with emotion incredibly fast.