In April 2022, Meta released Hand Tracking 2.0, its updated system that can detect things like high-fives and claps, but the company is now making 2.0 the default hand tracking technology for Quest apps. according to a blog post on Friday. Meta announced in September that it would stop using 1.0 in April 2023, and says the move to 2.0 as default is a “first step” toward that deprecation.
“Upgrading to Hand Tracking 2.0 does not require any action from developers, and we believe this change will improve the quality and capabilities of hand tracking in our app ecosystem,” Meta wrote in the post. “Hand Tracking 2.0 allows you to take full advantage of the many manual interactions available with the Interaction SDK.”
Meta first released hand tracking on the Quest in December 2019, but the 2.0 update, in addition to tracking high-fives and clapping, improved how the system detected motion if parts of your hands were locked from the hands. built-in chambers of the headphones. 2.0 isn’t actually Meta’s newest hand tracking technology; released Hand Tracking 2.1, which can better track fast movements and more accurately predict future hand positions, with Quest’s v47 operating system update in November. You can read about some of those enhancements on the meta blog.
Hand tracking could become a competitive battleground for VR headsets very soon, especially if Apple’s rumored VR/AR headset includes some of the hand tracking features detailed by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in a extensive report on Monday. Apple’s headphones will apparently let you use a pinch motion to “wake” things like a button or app icon, for example, which could mean the device won’t need drivers. (Meta’s Quest software also has pinch features.) And Apple is working on a way to let users “hand-type in the air,” Gurman reports, which sounds like a bad way to write my next article to me, but potentially useful for things like short searches or texts. .
