In a surprise post on the , the Facebook-owned VR company announced that tracking for act⭕ual human hands is coming to the Oculus Quest VR♏ Headset earlier than expected.
Oculus is releasing hand tracking as an early consumeඣr feature on Quest starting this week and as an SDK for developers next week. The feature will be bundled with the coming v12 update and will work with the Quest’s home interface and some first-party apps. Hand tracking will initially need to be enabled via the Experimental Features. Quest users will still be able to use controllers after the new feature is unlocked by toggling the feature off from the device’s Home Screen. If the provided with the announcement are accurate to actual conditions, hand tracking seems to make some trickier tasks, like setting a floor height, more intuitive.
Until now VR Headsets used a variety of oddly shaped but somehow ergonomic motion tracking controllers to allow players to interact with their virtual environments. The pro♍cess has been a compromise between the familiarity of the classic controller layout and the need to gesture wildly with one’s arms required by most VR apps and games. T🅷he PSVR and HTC Vive can also support a traditional gamepad for games without motion controls. This feature allows users to interface with their empty hands for the first time on a fully-featured headset.
Given that the SDK f🔯or this feature is just being relea🃏sed to developers it makes sense that hand tracking only works with Oculus apps. Once developers have had some time to work on the feature we might start to see some interesting new games and apps that take advantage of hand tracking.
Oculus will be the first major VR Headset maker to work without a controller of some kind. Valve and Sony’s headsets both still require a controller for their interface. This change comes just before the last bit of the holiday shopping rush adding a major selling point to the Quest over other V🅘R Headsets.
This brings us all one step closer to▨ the real world being like that one scene from Minority Report.
Source: The Oculus Blog