Original Oculus Quest Will Get Hand Tracking 2.0 Update

Original Oculus Quest Will Get Hand Tracking 2.0 Update

Hand Tracking 2.0 is coming to the original Oculus Quest in October.

The update arrived on Quest 2 in May, bringing dramatic improvements to using your hands without controllers. Meta said its researchers and engineers “developed a new method of applying deep learning to better understand hand poses when the device’s cameras can’t see the full hand or when the hand is moving quickly”, describing the result as “a step-function improvement in tracking continuity”. Some had speculated it was made possible by the Snapdragon XR2 chip, but that’s clearly not the case.

In ideal lighting conditions the new mode can handle your hands moving quickly, one hand covering the other, and even your hands touching – scenarios that previously caused the tracking to temporarily break. It makes Hand Tracking much more practical to use, and enables new actions like clapping and counting on fingers.

Hand Tracking 2.0 is an opt-in developer side upgrade, but almost all apps including Cubism, Unplugged: Air Guitar, and Hand Physics Lab support it. The reason it’s opt-in is that some older apps used developer-crafted hand tracking quality filtering algorithms to deal with the issues 1.0 had.

In December Hand Tracking 2.0 will become the default for all apps that don’t explicitly opt-out. And in April it will become the only hand tracking mode, with all apps automatically using it.