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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
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Five years after its $2 billion purchase of Oculus, Facebook is still pushing forward in its efforts to bring virtual reality to a mainstream audience. But one of the company's six co-founders now doubts Oculus will ever break through.
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The cheaper, standalone headsets are selling more units. Add foveated rendering and other enhancements at the lower price points (rather than $1,599 like the Vive Pro Eye), and the experience could become much better.
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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."
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 10 2019, @10:55AM
Should have been available at launch. Looks cool though.
To get it working in games and applications, map each controller button to a gesture?