From an AR design perspective, what is best for knocking down objects? Say in a game where you knock down blocks, is it better to have the user run the device through the blocks, tap the blocks, or press a button to trigger something to hit the blocks?
It depends which approach is best — each have a set of pros and cons based on what you want out of the experience.
It can be compelling to run through AR blocks if you want to emphasize lots of user motion in an experience and the scale of the experience is quite large — good for apps that can take advantage of wide open spaces.
Tapping them is more immediate and indirect so if you wanted to destroy a tower quickly or something like that then that would be the way to go — and I could see that being very satisfying to trigger many physics objects to react at once.
I think the same would apply to a button press, it’s an indirect way to trigger it if the experience requires rapidly knocking them down.
Overall I think it’s up to what you want the experience to be, and maintaining internal consistency with other interactions within the app.
Swiftstrike and Swiftshot are great example apps that use similar techniques.