You can do a lot of things with Blocks: smack them around, turn off gravity, select different modes and shapes. But at its heart, our flagship demo for Orion contains two fundamental interactions – creating blocks and grabbing blocks. These are built on pinching and grabbing, which are based on how we naturally use our hands in the real world.

This week we’re excited to share Pinch Utilities, a new component of our Unity Core Assets that gives you access to the power of pinch. As part of our Detector scripts, Pinch Utilities is a basic component for detecting a pinch gesture and providing useful information about it. With the radically enhanced tracking capabilities of Orion, this fundamental interactive “building block” makes it possible to interact with digital content like never before.

As part of this release, we’ve included two simple demos that show how you can integrate Pinch into your project – Pinch Move and Pinch Draw.

With Pinch Move, you can twist, transform, and explore the inside of a Menger sponge. Pinching with one hand instantly locks the cube’s motions to your hand, so that you can easily move it around. Use two hands to rotate the shape and change its size. Shrink it to the size of a building block, or stretch it into infinity. The demo includes options for single-axis or full object rotation.

Pinch Draw is a simple creative demo that uses pinch interactions to create sketches in midair – transforming your fingers into 3D paintbrushes. Simple interactions like these can be a powerful foundation to more complex experiences.

Inside the Pinch Utilities module, you’ll find a Unity Behavior called LeapPinchDetector. This is the reusable component that detects the gesture and provides your project with the information it needs.

Pinch Utilities just the first of many fundamental building tools that we have in development. So fire up the demos, start building, and let us know what modules you’d like to see next!