This week in a tweet on the Oculus Developers Twitter account, Facebook revealed that they are now officially opening up submissions for hand-tracking apps on the Oculus Quest.
For an example of what’s possible in games, here is some footage of the new Waltz of the Wizard update that introduces hand-tracking features.
The hand-tracking update officially rolled out to the Oculus Quest on May 19th with Update v17, which removed the preview tag from the feature and SDK. Hand-tracking is also coming to Unreal (UE4) soon as well. Now as of yesterday, May 28th, Oculus is officially accepting developer submissions for apps that include hand-tracking features.
To help devs get started, the Oculus Developer blog includes link to resources about enabling hand tracking in your app, how to design well for hands instead of motion controllers, and VRC requirements. There is also a link to hand-tracking with Unity specifically.
Below, you can also see a future concept video from Facebook that utilizes passthrough on the VR headset’s camera to provide floating windows. This could be used to simulate a virtual office environment inside the headset for productivity apps and workflow. Something like this is still very far off, but neat to think about.
I’ve tried the free Oculus Reality Lab and Magnopus colalborative effort, Elixir, which is a demo game designed to show off hand-tracking features. You can get it now on Quest. It’s a cute and fun puzzle game that lasts about 10 minutes and has you messing around with various gadgets in a sorceress’ office as her new apprentice.
For more details, check out the Oculus Developer blog.
