Meta introduced hand tracking to its Quest (formerly Oculus Quest) line-up last year, which enabled the VR headsets to utilise their external cameras to track your hand movements and commands. Now, the company has announced that a version 2.0 of the ability will be rolled out, featuring vast improvements and new features.
Hand tracking on the Quest headsets is pretty useful, especially if you wish to control its interface or certain apps without having to pick up the accompanying controllers. However, it is far from perfect, sometimes failing to register fast movements or gesture commands; leading to moments of frustration. This update aims to rectify that and more, according to Meta’s latest blog post.
Version 2.0 promises more consistent tracking, enabling for a more smoother, accurate, and responsive experience. The boost in performance is accredited to Meta’s updated AI-based approaches that are better at understanding hand poses by fully utilising the onboard cameras, despite their limited field of view. Impressively, this update is also applicable to the original, four-year-old Quest model.
In addition, the improved hand tracking also allows for newer gestures such as hand clapping, giving a thumbs up and virtual high-fives, as well as others that involve occlusion. You can expect developers to take advantage of this update as well for both existing and upcoming apps that support hand-tracking. For instance, air guitar-based rhythm game Unplugged recharted all of its featured songs to make full use of the improved tracking, while handling of 3D objects in Cubism now feels more natural than before.
Meta revealed that the continuous development and improvements to its hand tracking technology will also be carried over to its future VR and mixed reality products. This is to be expected as the company has been busy building up hype for its Metaverse, where the feature will likely play a prominent role.
Even though Meta says the update has been rolled out, it’s still not available on the Quest 2 just yet last we checked. Nevertheless, we advise you to check your Quest VR headset’s software update page in Settings just in case it does come out in a couple more hours or days.
(Source: Meta [official Oculus blog])
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