My news feed this morning had an article that the Oculus Quest will have hand tracking added as a feature later this week.  This is a big deal.  Being able to manipulate a VR environment without having to depend on controllers for tracking is huge.  This opens up all sorts of opportunities for VR and AR going forward if controllers aren’t needed for tracking.  The applications go beyond VR/AR, remember the movie Minority Report and how they interfaced with the computers using hand gestures? Even in that movie there is some sort of special glove involved, but with this technology that wouldn’t be necessary.

I can also see a possibility with mobile devices.  If your cell phone could track your hands then you could manipulate it anytime the phone is in sight.  There’s a lot of potential here.  To begin with, the Oculus Quest hand tracking will only be in the menus and the Oculus apps, like Browser and Video, however it likely won’t be long until developers begin to take advantage of this.  Could we see a guitar instruction app where you can learn with no guitar necessary?  It will be super interesting to see where this goes.

The articles say the hand tracking feature will be active this week.  Over the weekend I will test this and report back!