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BrandenJD.
Explorer
Status: New Idea

Hello, I have a suggestion for Oculus link and air link. Hand tracking should be enabled in oculus link also air link. Because so developers can enable hand tracking in their meta PCVR games. I’m sure lots of people would like to see this feature added eventually! Thanks.

9 Comments
ZEROPHILOSOPHY
Explorer

Absolutely agree! I am unable to pair my controllers and without hand tracking working on my pc link ,I'm stuck . 

It would actually be a nice idea to have the initial setup done in hand trackin and push users to make this thier defacto interface method. I think we all feel controllers tethered to the wrists just add restriction to the vr experience .  Appdevs really hav3 to get the ball rolling with hand eye tracking integration,  not many games apps support this interface method currently.  

20221030_110731.jpg

Xranscendent
Honored Guest

Yes this really needs to happen and we've been waiting for it a long time already.

 

With Meta Quest Pro it's bordering on the ridiculous that we don't have this functionality. 

 

Meta can you please communicate on when we might see this?

Pixie40
Expert Trustee

While hand tracking is pretty neat, I can honestly see why it isn't a thing for PC right now. I'd imagine the input delay as the tracking info gets processed then sent to the PC would be a hurdle. Then there's control issues. My experience so far is that while hand tracking can be very immersive, it's also limiting for games since you're lacking thumb sticks and the face buttons. Still pretty cool when it's implemented well though.

 

I just don't think the technology is quite mature yet. Of course, I also kind of want full body tracking without having to buy expensive Steam Tracking pucks and convoluted setup.

 

And an affordable dedicated VR play surface that can act as a 360 degree treadmill so that I can walk or run in VR without running into the walls or using thumb sticks. Hey, a pixie can dream!

KrisITB
Explorer

"I'd imagine the input delay as the tracking info gets processed then sent to the PC would be a hurdle." nope, I had it working (two weeks ago) over link with zero problems on a different machine that I currently have no access to and somehow when I try to set it up on different PC and laptop I cannot see an option to enable hand tracking . Beside, even if you want to go wirelessly sending controller position is faaaaaaaar less data than audio (never-mind video) so you are so wrong here that I have to continue with my criticism. 

 

"it's also limiting for games since you're lacking thumb sticks and the face button" ...tragedy! How can you live without thumb sticks and face button?!?! With all due respect it looks that you are trying to find any reason to block hand tracking option, no-one is forcing you to leave your controllers, hand tracking is a very powerful additional option, if it will be properly supported it's a matter of time to design new UI solutions, but you really aren't helping here. 

 

"I just don't think the technology is quite mature yet." ...maybe you should purchase more mature hardware. 

 

"And an affordable dedicated VR play surface that can act as a 360 degree treadmill so that I can walk or run in VR without running into the walls or using thumb sticks." ... like an omnidirectional treadmill? How do you define affordable? 

 

"Hey, a pixie can dream!"...and your dreams will never come true if most devs/users will share your approach to addressing and communicating problems. 

 

Kind regards

PiteurMC
Protege

Funny thing about this subject is that if you develop an app who use hand-tracking with Unity and you test the app using Quest link, you CAN use hand-tracking on PCVR.

The editor allow you to test your app, running on the PC with Hand-tracking (so you can test your hand-tracking app without having to build it). But if you "build" the app as a PCVR game, PCVR hand-tracking stop working.

So it's 100% possible to have PCVR hand-tracking, it's just an autorization problem.

Please Unity/Meta/Unreal, allow us to build PCVR Quest hand-tracking apps! 😉

BattleAxeVR
Expert Protege

You can use the new body tracking extension to get not only all the relevant hand poses over Link and AirLink now on PC, but many others.

I have a demo here (some pre-built APKs and a hello_xr.exe for PC testing. Make sure you have all optional features and enabled latest alpha/beta builds in Oculus Home app):

https://github.com/BattleAxeVR/OpenXR-SDK-Source

Llama_of_Death
Honored Guest

We have been told in other threads it simply isn't possible currently, but what else might work temporarily?

I personally can use the mouse and keyboard in QPro reasonably well, what if we just tied an input bound to the head tracking and allowed the mouse to interact with the headset view?

Is that useful to anyone else? 

BattleAxeVR
Expert Protege

Hand tracking works on all Quests over Link/AirLink on PC through OpenXR extensions, you just need a developer account mode and enable "dev features".

THIS is still the main problem. Unity won't let you build shipping builds w/ these features even IF you do have dev account enabled on Oculus Home, because that's just Unity being Unity (closed source and anti-dev/anti-consumer).

So much for "open platform" Mark Zuckerberg talks about. It's pretty clear by this point the dev mode account restriction will never be lifted and all us PC VR devs are left out to dry. The only solution seems to be to completely abandon AirLink and hope Steam Link will provide FBT (which includes hand tracking) sooner than later. To be honest, Meta should be ashamed that third party tools provide better support than your own streaming software which is a core advertised feature (PC compatibility).

@John @neurodivrgent  @johnbart_oculus

BattleAxeVR
Expert Protege

The other problem is, with simultaneous hand and controller tracking, is that because the controllers have an integrated IMU with sensor fusion, if you wave your hand quickly it will disconnect visibly from the controller, due to different amounts of lag. They could fix this by implementing a "re-anchored" hand pose if it's holding the controller, so that it would still track fingers opening/closing but the hand would stay on the controller. They may have done this already but last I tried, it didn't work. And for games with controller grip extensions like Golf, which arguably are a big reason why you would want such a feature (1 controller + 1 free hand which grips the same controller via an extended handle), the second hand needs to be anchorable to the same controller to negate the hand tracking latency. They have gesture detection so should be able to detect when the offhand is gripping the same controller, or even detect that the controller itself has an extension on it via SLAM. I guess I'm asking too much of a billion dollar mega corporation and will have to implement this myself. Oh well, what else is new. Same goes for AirLink: the second Steam Link or Virtual Desktop support IOBT or FBT through OpenXR on PC, AirLink is irrelevant and people should simply stop using it. Enough with the dev mode account restriction, it's bordering on false advertising. When people buy a PC VR-compatible headset they expect, naturally, that the features they paid for will work on PC as well. There is NO REASON for the dev account restriction other than Meta signaling to us they only see PC as a development platform to reduce Android iteration times, but actually otherwise want PC VR game developers to stay stuck to HMD + 2 controllers for shipping games, and that's it. This is why PC VR is dying, and Meta isn't helping. It's hurting. And I believe this must be deliberate. If not, prove me wrong and fix it already. PLEASE. I've been a loyal Oculus developer since 2016 and the way you're treating us devs is shameful.