Oculus Quest Getting Built-In Hand Tracking, PC Games

At its annual Oculus Connect conference, Facebook-owned Oculus announced a ton of new updates to its platform on Wednesday. The company revealed some major updates to its wireless, standalone Quest headset.

Oculus Quest is soon getting some major new features — including built-in hand tracking. The headset will receive the ability to track your hands through a software update, without needing any external sensor, PC, or controller. The feature will launch in early 2020 as an experimental feature and uses computer vision to be able to track your hands and understand the positioning of your fingers using the existing monochrome cameras on the Quest. The device doesn’t have any depth-sensing cameras, so this is pretty amazing.

Facebook is investing quite a lot on the Oculus Quest line, and the company promised “Forward Compatability” for the headset, meaning games and other VR experiences that already work on the existing Quest will work just fine on the next-gen Quest, which Facebook says is under development. The Quest is also getting Oculus Rift S headset’s Passthrough+ feature which gives you a better view of the real world without any discomfort or distortions.

The company also announced its new Oculus Link feature, which allows users to play PC games on their Quest from the Rift platform via high-quality USB 3 cables. It will even release a premium optical fiber cable that provides a faster, more reliable experience later this year. Essentially, Oculus Link will let you use your PC’s power to play some of the more extreme VR titles that you otherwise won’t be able to play on the Quest’s hardware.

And last but not least, Oculus announced the company is bringing some of the popular Oculus Go apps to the Quest platform, starting with 50 Oculus Go titles. Oculus will also allow owners of paid Oculus Go apps to get the Quest version of the apps for free before the end of the year, but you will have to purchase it separately after that if you want that same app on your Quest.