Oculus Quest Launches Built-In Hand Tracking

Facebook’s Oculus is rolling out support for built-in hand-tracking on its Oculus Quest headset a little earlier than expected. The feature, first announced back in September, was originally supposed to launch sometime in early 2020.

But now, Facebook is shipping the feature early to users as an experimental feature, with limited functionalities.

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Hand-tracking on the Quest is a big deal because you won’t need any external sensors for the feature to work. Just put your headset on, and apps/games that support hand-tracking will automatically start letting you interact with it using your hands.

For now, though, the experience is a little limited. Oculus says the feature will work with Quest’s home interfaces like the Library and Store, as well as its Oculus Browser and Oculus TV apps, but you will have to wait for third-party apps and games to add support for the new hand-tracking feature. Facebook’s Instagram seems to be one of the first apps to be doing so:

Oculus says hand-tracking on the Quest is rolling out as Quest software v12, and it can be enabled through the Experimental Features menu. The company is going to release a software developement kit for third-party developers next week so they can start interacting the new hand-tracking features into their own apps and games.