First Hand is a new demo built by Meta to introduce Quest buyers to advanced interactions built around hand tracking.
The app sees players interacting with a virtual menu to construct robotic gloves that, when worn, offer superpowers somewhere between those delivered by Tony Stark’s Iron Man suit or Alyx Vance’s gravity gloves.
The demo available through Meta’s App Lab program lists both Quest and Quest 2 support for hand tracking only. According to Meta, the app’s creators drew inspiration from the company’s original First Contact demo for the Oculus Rift. For Oculus Quest, Facebook released First Steps as a demo which originally relied on only tracked controllers to introduce players to VR interactions. Last year, though, the company added hand tracking support as part of a company-wide push to embrace the open air input system.
“Use switches, levers, and virtual UIs as you solve puzzles to build robotic gloves—and then experience their superpowers,” a blog post from Meta explains. “First Hand is shipping on App Lab and as an open source project for developers who would like to understand and easily replicate similar interactions in their own games and apps.”
The demo is built on Meta’s latest tools for developers, called the Presence Platform Interaction SDK, and it launches ahead of Project Cambria — a new high-end professional headset from Meta that’s likely to take the company’s hand tracking technology to new heights. The headset is due out this year but its specific release date and pricing are still unknown.
