During F8 this year, it was said that Oculus will be bringing its hand-tracking update early next year. At that point, I thought it was a bit soon, but to my surprise, Oculus has announced that its hand-tracking update will be releasing this week.
A new v12 firmware update has started to roll out that will enable downloaders of the update to enable hand-tracking. Seeing as the update can take a number of days, if not weeks, for the update to appear on their Quest, it is no wonder why Oculus has released it now.
Once the v12 firmware has been downloaded to your Quest, simply head on over to Settings > Experimental Features and then enable the hand-tracking option.
The ability for hand-tracking will mean you will not require the Oculus Touch controllers to interact with the home screen menus, as well as use your digits to interact with various menus in streaming and social apps on the Quest. Gesturing will also become a little deeper with the ability for hand-tracking on the Quest.
Sadly, with the developer SDK only rolling out next week, we will have to wait before we see hand-tracking featured specifically in games. Until then, you can try hand-tracking with the Quest’s Home Library and Store interfaces, along with Oculus Browser and Oculus TV, which being first-party titles, both also have support for hand-tracking.
Using hands or Touch controllers is easily swapped by flipping the toggle in your Oculus Home menu. Personally, I would have liked a more intuitive way to switch between them, such as wiggle your fingers if you want to track your hands whilst the controllers are stationary or out of sight.
Because this is an early beta of this feature, don’t expect this to be perfect. Oculus will continue to be improving the hand-tracking experience in 2020 before making it a default option for new users.
Look out for v12 update on your Quest in the next few days. If you’re lucky enough to get it now, let us know what you think in the comments.
