HandMove

A single-script pinch-to-teleport mechanic for Meta Quest VR, built in Unity. Users pinch to place a "ground reticle", or a circle on the ground, then they look around -- wherever they look, the circle moves along the ground. They pinch again to teleport to the spot where the reticle is — with real-time color feedback for invalid targets and a custom demo scene for testing across varied terrain.

Most VR teleportation schemes are clunky, controller-dependent, and cognitively heavy — they force the user to think about navigation rather than inhabiting the virtual space. Handmove reduces this to a minimum: pinch your fingers together and a teleport arc appears; release to move. Publicly available as a Unity package designed for minimal integration.

David Malan from Harvard CS Department trying the mechanic

Extends Meta's All-In-One SDK with a custom C# script, prefabs, and a sample scene. Uses hand-tracking data to detect finger proximity, computes a parabolic arc toward the target surface, and smoothly transitions the camera rig. Special attention paid to reducing motion sickness: the arc preview provides spatial context before teleporting, and the transition is deliberately instantaneous rather than animated.

Hand tracking input is captured via Meta's SDK and a raycast projects from the headset to the ground each frame. A boolean validates the target surface; a Renderer modifier flips the reticle red for invalid positions. The reticle snaps instantly to wherever the user looks (replacing an earlier lerp that felt laggy) and a framerate regression — caused by esoteric Unity rendering settings — was resolved after a full rewrite to maintain the 72fps floor VR requires. A demo scene with mountains, ridges, planks, and valleys stress-tests edge cases.

Meta's VR SDK is powerful but nearly undocumented, and Unity's component architecture makes sharing reusable tools painful. The goal was to solve this once, cleanly — packaging the entire mechanic into one drag-and-drop script that any developer could attach to Meta's standard OVR Camera prefab and use immediately.

Unity demo scene