CEO of Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, has announced significant improvements to its Presence Platform's Hand Tracking technology on the Quest VR headsets. This will allow better hand tracking, gesture recognition, and overall performance without the need for VR controllers in its metaverse.
"In the metaverse, your hands will move as naturally as they do in the physical world. Our Presence Platform's hand-tracking tech keeps improving to support more gestures, tracking continuity, and fast movement," said Zuckerberg.
Meta has released a series of videos showcasing the overhauled tech, referred to as Hands 2.0. The best example is this Hand Physics Lab comparison showing someone doing various virtual tasks like playing with blocks or punching a dummy without using controllers with surprisingly good accuracy.
One of the biggest obstacles currently with this controller-less technology is how often the headset loses track of your hands which breaks the immersion in whatever game you are playing in VR. Heck, we've seen it happen with actual VR controllers, too, forcing you to stop and calibrate them in the middle of a game of virtual laser tag with your bros.
The update is said to have better tracking continuity, so when you're goofing around in the metaverse, you don't have to worry about seeing your hands jittering around in real-time because the headset lost sight of them.
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Zuckerberg explains how Hand Tracking 2.0 allows for faster hand movements and more accurate fingering in games like Unplugged: Air Guitar. "Developers can now integrate more responsive hands into apps. For example, the guitar app Unplugged will support faster riffs and more notes to make playing in virtual reality more realistic."
The most impressive thing about this update is the difference in detecting more refined finger movements is night and day. Of course, the videos of folks playing air guitar and solving cube puzzles are cool; we will have to try it ourselves to see the improvements.
An early preview of Hands 2.0 is already in the um, hands of developers. You can expect to see updates to some gaming apps on the Quest soon.
