There’s a lot of exploration happening right now in the intersection of virtual reality and gestural control. By pairing an Oculus Rift headset and Leap Motion’s gestural control reader, designers are creating innovative new interactive experiences . And with those technologies in mind, software developers Aesthetic Interactive have designed a user interface to place a VR menu literally at our fingertips.

To call up the Hovercast VR Menu, a user opens their hand towards their face and a menu for adjusting settings of a cubes demo environment automatically populates, radiating off the tips of the fingers.

The menu can be pulled up on one hand, and using the opposite hand, the settings are adjusted by pinching fingers or dragging a virtual slider. The prototype allows for tweaking the color, size, type of motion of the floating elements, and the camera angle by which the user views them.

It’s impressive, watching the demo video, how seamlessly the gestures trigger the menu’s commands, but we think Hovercast’s coolest feature is the ability to go back to the previous menu by clenching your fist and then opening it again–an extremely intuitive gesture for “back.” Hovercast’s technology is built to be integrated into any VR experience, providing an easy way to adjust settings without using other hardware.

[via Prosthetic Knowledge]