Half-Life: Alyx’s gravity gloves ruined a lot of other virtual reality games for me, as the ability to point and flip objects in my hands solved many tricky maneuvering problems common in other games. It’s hard, after the elegance of Half-Life’s system, to go back to bending, stepping sideways, and reaching for the air to pick up items – or worse, your hands don’t have any collision with the world around you. away.
Enter the modders. Specifically enter modder FlyingParticle, which released HIGGS VR for Skyrim VR. It’s a mod that adds gravity glove-style interaction to Skyrim, and looks like it works beautifully.
HIGGS stands for Hand Interaction and Gravity Gloves for Skyrim. VR-focused YouTuber Cangar created the video below to demonstrate the mod’s features, and it includes everything you’d expect from a mod inspired by Alyx:
You can point out items and put them in your hands. You can now use your hands to slide things onto tables. Your in-game hands grip models in natural positions, so you can hold bottles from the base, the tip, or another point down the side, for example. You can now drop items over your shoulder to put them in a pocket, a common feature in many first-person VR games. You can use this system to remove armor from defeated enemies. It even works with Skyrim’s theft system and marks objects in red that you can label as a thief for picking them up.
There are a few differences between this implementation between this and Half-Life: Alyx. Firstly, here you are pointing your palm at objects to pull them towards you, which I imagine it takes some getting used to. However, a .ini file is included that allows you to tailor some settings to your preference.
Instructions for installing and setting up HIGGS VR can be found on the mod’s Nexus Mods page. You’ll want to download the VRIK mod for the full experience you see in the video above as that will give you an in-game body and finger animation to grab objects.