Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
SAN JOSE, Calif.—Oculus is clearly bullish on its wireless VR system, the Oculus Quest, which means this week's Oculus Connect conference is chock full of the $400 headsets. The biggest queues at the show, unsurprisingly, have been dedicated to Quest—and to the headset's pair of surprise "coming soon" features announced on Tuesday morning.
So much Quest attention is due to promising sales figures: "over $20 million" of games and apps have been sold on Quest's digital marketplace since its May launch, Oculus announced on Tuesday, as opposed to "over $80 million" of Rift-specific software since that platform's March 2016 launch. Four months versus three-plus years? We don't need a graphing calculator to plot which platform is kicking more software-sales butt.
With that momentum in mind, I cut a few lines to see the two intriguing features slated for Quest's near-future: a wired PC-VR connection, launching this November, and a full hand-tracking API, launching in "early 2020."
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Surprise! Oculus Quest becomes first VR set with native hand tracking
Starting this week, the Oculus Quest VR headset becomes even more tantalizing by adding a feature we've never seen ship as a built-in option in a VR system: hand tracking. VR users will be able to put down their controllers and use their fingers to manipulate VR worlds, as tracked by Quest's array of built-in cameras.
The feature received a tease at October's Oculus Connect 6 conference and got an "early 2020" launch window from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. But someone on the Oculus engineering team clearly ignored Lord Zuck in getting this feature out the door a bit early, and it will land in an "experimental" tab in Quest's settings menus as a free update by week's end.
Today's news comes with two important asterisks. First, there's no fully fledged VR software available for the feature yet. At launch, the experimental feature will only work within Oculus Quest's root menu, which at least includes photo and multimedia viewing tabs. Within "a week" of the toggle going live, a Software Development Kit (SDK) for Quest hand tracking will go live for Oculus developers, which will allow them to tap into Oculus' hand-tracking system and potentially implement it in various games and apps.
And second, Oculus is limiting its hand-tracking framework to the Quest ecosystem. This update isn't coming to the PC-centric Rift or Rift S headsets, and it won't work if you use Oculus Link to connect a Quest to your favorite PC VR games.
Also at CNET
previously:
The Future Of Oculus Quest: Hands-On With Hand Tracking, PC-VR "Link" Mode
Oculus Co-Founder Says there is No Market for VR Gaming
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by barbara hudson on Sunday September 29 2019, @07:11PM (2 children)
That's a far cry from initial market preditions in the Beellionzzz by 2020. Quite a bad return for an investment of $2.3 billion by Facebook.
We've seen this movie before - on 3d TV sets. And before that, with 3d movies with the dorky 3d glasses.
You know something has decidedly lost its cool when an insurance company uses a father wearing a VR headset walking around the room swatting at imaginary foes while the son, sitting on the couch, looks up from his phone and his expression says "what a dork!"
Still, it might be good for keeping the next generation of incels off the streets ... though it will probably also create more incels as males withdraw further from real social interaction.
On the bright side, it should help reduce population growth.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Monday September 30 2019, @12:28AM (1 child)
That's software sales, not hardware sales. Free VR content isn't going to be represented in that number. If it's possible to download/sideload content from a non-Facebook source, that's not going to be counted.
Facebook's bread and butter is advertising, so that's how they expect to make their money from VR. They want people exposed to Facebook advertising at all times.
I would prefer VR headsets to work like monitors, without a close relationship between a headset brand and some app store.
You should be preaching about how great Facebook is, keeping the incels from destroying civilization by offering VR waifus. Thanks, Zuckerborg.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Monday September 30 2019, @04:56PM
It's a turkey, and the only reason it hasn't been 86'd is ego - nobody wants to admit they made a mistake.
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.