Apple Vision Pro is now home to two of VR’s best-selling titles, Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator from Owlchemy Labs.
Both titles fully support hand tracking – a first for Job Simulator – which launches on Apple Vision Pro at the same time the feature is added to the game on Quest headsets. Vacation Simulator is a larger title, Owlchemy’s follow up to its 2016 original, which added more expansive levels and some additional gameplay concepts.
Owlchemy was acquired by Google in 2017 with Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator on Steam, Quest and PlayStation VR headsets serving as some of the best introductions to the medium ever made. Owlchemy says both Job Simulator and Vacation Simulator have sold more than 1 million copies each and Job Simulator was a launch title for all major tracked VR input systems of the last decade.
On Apple Vision Pro with hand tracking, the interaction quality jogs that feeling some of us had for the first time on HTC Vive with Owlchemy’s work nearly a decade ago. We’ll have deeper impressions soon, but it’s a big day for Google’s Owlchemy, a big day for Apple’s platform and a date to mark in VR history.
May 28, 2024 is the day Job Simulator officially launched with hand tracking on Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest headsets.
Vacation Simulator launched in 2019 and, over a year later in 2020, got controller-free hand tracking support on Quest.
“I think we got it,” Andrew Eiche, the CEO of Owlchemy Labs, told me last year when we demoed the company’s latest hand tracking technology. “How do you get a billion people to play VR? The controllers are a barrier. They are built like video game controllers.”
Vacation Simulator is priced $29.99 and Job Simulator is $19.99 on the App Store.
