Oculus Quest's hand tracking feature launches early

Oculus is releasing the hand tracking feature early – it was supposed to come out in 2020, but you can try it this week. It will arrive as part of the v12 update, after you have that installed, you’ll find Hand tracking in the Experimental features menu.

At first, only the Oculus Home menus and the Oculus TV interface will support hand tracking. However, the SDK for developers will be released next week so that they can start building new experiences.

Here’s a quick demo below that shows what can be achieved. Beyond the simple act of pressing something with your finger, a pinch gesture can be used to trigger additional functions.

Hand tracking will make the VR experience more immersive (holding on to a controller isn’t always a good analog to what is happening in the game). And it will make the setup more portable as all you need to pack is the Oculus Quest itself, leaving the controllers behind.

Anyway, the first third-party games and applications to make use of hand-tracking will be released in January 2020. Developers using Unity will get access to the new feature, support for the UE4 engine is coming in Q1 next year.

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