A newly released update for the Oculus Browser on Quest includes full-finger hand-tracking support for WebXR projects.

The feature was quietly released in the recent 10.2 build of Oculus Browser, which now comes with a hand-tracking API and timewarp layer support, both of which are considered ‘experimental’ at this time.

The 8.0 version of Oculus Browser released back in February was the first to include initial hand-tracking support for WebXR projects, although it was focused on controller emulation and not true five-finger tracking.

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Oculus Browser Product Manager Jacob Rossi announced the news via Twitter, providing some examples via a WebXR test page and layer page which demonstrates hand-tracking and timewarp layer support respectively.

Check out a demo in the familiar WebXR solar system scene featuring the new hand-tracking support:

https://twitter.com/mrdoob/status/1285823288795693056

Hand-tracking came to Oculus Quest as an experimental feature back in late 2019. The intuitive control scheme has since come out of beta and is now available for all Quest owners to use system-wide, letting you control the basic functions of Quest without the need of Touch controllers.

Moreover, there are an increasing number of games and cool experimentations that make use of Quest’s native hand-tracking abilities. We’re hoping to see more soon using the full five-fingered hand-tracking support on Quest.

As for timewarp layer support, just like on non-WebXR-based apps timewarp support allows the headset to reproject past frames when the scene can’t maintain its native refresh rate, which in Quest’s case is 72Hz.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Adrian Meredith

    Niiice been meaning to update my WebXR app and this would be very cool addition

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  • Cool!!

  • None of the pages you linked to seem to mention “timewarp”?

    • Just had a long chat with the A-Frame developers about this. The article above is wrong.

      Oculus Browser 10.2 added *compositor* layers. These allow new improvements when rendering video/still images/panoramas. They are, incidentally, also timewarped. But the old WebXR layers (eye buffers) were already timewarped (have been for a while, since 6.0).

      “There’s no new magic to make your application faster” :(

  • duck

    Thumbs up

  • Any idea if this will work out of the box for WebXR apps? I run a site (https://gamechef.io) and am wondering if I should tweak the games we’ve already got, or if it’ll just work.

  • JS

    Can they figure out how to have a mode wherein they re-position the hands so that you can make gestures while keeping hands lower.

  • JS

    They should have a mode wherein you can opt to automatically re-position the hands so that you can make gestures while keeping hands lower and gestures subtler.

  • Ad

    This is cool, and I think webXR is the best place for hand tracking. I’m just a little bummed this isn’t some open source solution where you could use a leap motion, hololens, northstar, etc. I talked to someone on Mozilla WebXR and for them the whole point of webXR is that it is totally open, nothing about it is controlled or exclusive to anyone or anything. I really think the other companies should toss some money at making the mixed reality toolkit (which works with leaps too) as easy to get into as whatever the facebook api is so we can hopefully open up this space.

  • Muhammad hammad

    nice