Oculus Connect 6 is starting today, and ahead of the festivities Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg teased a video showing off some pretty nuanced hand interaction, something he says will be apart of his talk today. Now, we know that Quest will soon include optical hand-tracking.
Update (1:15 PM ET): Mark Zuckerberg announced on stage at Oculus Connect 6 that Quest will soon have hand-tracking. Zuckerberg maintains it will arrive on Quest sometime early next year as an experimental feature for consumers and an SDK for developers.
In a blogpost, the company says its computer vision team developed “a new method of using deep learning to understand the position of your fingers using just the monochrome cameras on Quest today.” This means no active depth-sensing cameras, additional sensors, or extra processors required. It can, the company says, approximate the shape of your hand and creates a set of 3D points to accurately represent your hand and finger movement in VR.
It will also be available for demo here at OC6, so we’ll be bringing our impressions to you as soon as possible. Check out the reveal video below:
Original Article (12:20 PM ET):
“Putting the final touches on my talk for Oculus Connect tomorrow. I’m excited to share our latest work in augmented and virtual reality,” Zuckerberg writes.
It’s not clear exactly what new research Zuckerberg will present, although it may have something to do with the company’s recent acquisition plans of brain-computer interface startup CTRL-Labs, which develops a wrist-worn neural input device.
CTRL-Labs so called CTRL-kit device is a wrist-worn wearable that the company describes as a “non-invasive neural interface platform that lets developers reimagine the relationship between humans and machines with new, intuitive control schemes.”
The kit was “in preview for select developers” but not yet openly available at the time of the acquisition.
At this point, who knows. If you’re itching to find out, you can watch the livestream along with us here.
Road to VR will have feet on the ground at this year’s Oculus Connect, so check back for breaking news, hands-ons, and everything AR/VR to come from the event.