The controllers for modern VR devices may have some clever ideas that make gameplay intuitive, but there's nothing more intuitive than using your own hands. That seems to be the idea behind Oculus' plan to introduce hand tracking to the new Oculus Quest.

The video included in the announcement shows the gist of what they hope to achieve: using cameras to track multiple points on the players' hands, letting them interact with menus and the game world without having to use controllers, gloves, or other peripherals.

For those who want more details than what can be shown in a dialogue-free, pre-rendered video, Oculus has a somewhat-more-detailed explanation for what's going on behind the scenes of its new tech. The system apparently combines a neural network with the Oculus Quest's four monochrome cameras to predict the actual location of the user's hands. It reconstructs a "26 degree-of-freedom" pose from the data and builds a 3D model that can be used in the games.

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If the system works as well as Oculus is letting on, there's an enormous amount of potential just waiting to be realized. Hand gestures and arm movements could all be used for different gaming elements, from fighting and casting magical spells to handling intricate tasks in a manner that tasks your own coordination in a way that even the best VR controllers couldn't possibly achieve. There's still the question of how best to provide meaningful feedback in a system that only consists of a headset, but there are plenty of creative developers out there that are no doubt capable of thinking of ways around the system's limitations.

via:youtube

Of course, Oculus seems to realize that the technology is not yet at the level it needs to be to hold up an entire gaming experience. The announcement clearly lists the technology as "experimental," and it's not going to be available for use by developers or players until 2020.

So, will the system work as well as Oculus wants us to believe, or will it end up janky and unreliable like the Kinect often did? We'll have to wait until next year to really know, but it's hard not to get excited at the potential.

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