The Oculus Quest is a monumentally cool piece of hardware. All the adventures and experiences of virtual reality without all the messy cables tripping everyone up, the Quest is arguably the best VR platform you could invest in. We certainly thought so when we got our hands on it at the end of last year, impressed with the power and variety encased in a shell that didn’t feel like taping an anvil to your face. The Quest is about to become even better now that a highly anticipated feature is about to leap out of beta. Yes, controller free hand-tracking will finally be arriving on the Oculus Quest as soon as this month.
Well, it’s making it’s official introduction soon but it won’t be a feature in every available game and application on the platform. When hand tracking does arrive later this month, on 28 May to be precise, it will be supported by a small group of third-party apps with the number of studios implementing it expected to grow as the feature becomes more streamlined. At launch, The Curious Tale of the Stolen Pets, Waltz of the Wizard and Elixir will support the new feature as well as Animated VR films Gloomy Eyes and The Line.
What’s more encouraging is that the day the update arrives for the Quest, developers can begin submitting projects that support hand tracking, proving that Oculus is clearly intent on pushing this new feature as a mainline addition to the platform. So one can expect to see a huge surge in controller-free Oculus Quest experiences in the near future but whether or not those will be decent…well, that’s a mystery for another day.
Hand tracking has come a long way since it was rather poorly implemented in arcadey console gimmicks like the Xbox Kinect so if this new feature is treated with the same level of dedication and passion that the rest of the Oculus quest has received then we expect the addition will be more than a little impressive.
(Source: The Verge)
