Six students on the Game Production and Management course at Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences in Germany created FLOAT, a mixed-reality game for Meta Quest headsets that is played with your hands alone, without controllers.
In the game, players help small creatures called Pookis cross floating islands, holding out a hand as a bridge or shielding them from a waterfall. Anyone who wants to can wear an armband that measures muscle signals in the forearm and send the anonymised data to MyoMod, a Frankfurt start-up.
MyoMod wants to build robust, affordable myoelectric prosthetic hands, including for people in poorer countries, and needs plenty of gesture data to train their control. According to the team, the game, free on the Meta Horizon Store, had around 18,000 downloads by the end of August and an average rating of 4.4 out of 5.
FLOAT won the 2026 New Realities Award from 1E9 and XR HUB Bavaria at the Festival der Zukunft in Munich, as well as awards in Warsaw and Germany. Donating data is optional: the game can be played without the armband.
