Meta Platforms unveiled last week the latest iteration of its hand-tracking technologies as a demo for developers, allowing users to explore virtual worlds with their hands rather than physical controllers.
The company’s First Hand demo leverages Meta’s Presence Platform Interaction software development kit (SDK) to solve challenges in immersive environments to build robotic gloves with increasingly advanced superpowers.
Meta’s App Lab will host the First Hand demo for developers to create their own games and creative content, inspired by Oculus First Contact’s six degrees of freedom (6DoF) Touch controller features.
According to Meta, such technologies aimed to tackle technical, perceptive, and physiological challenges for users to deliver optimised experiences based on “direct interactions.”
Interaction SDK also provides users with advanced heuristics to boost natural interactions with virtual objects and user interfaces, as well as improved grabbing techniques with numerous object types.
The platform also includes the following features:
- Hand Pose Authoring Tool for creating more realistic, lifelike poses for virtual hands
- Modular systems for adjusting hand-tracking functions such as pose recognition and velocity tracking
- HandRef, which substitutes real Hand objects to create prefabricated functions
- Mutiple ActiveStates to direct functions and touchable interfaces on Unity Technologies’ user interface (UI), along with PointableCanvas additions
- Snap Interactors for fixing objects into place spatially linked to other objects
- Touch Grab features to grip smaller objects and build dynamic hand poses based on physics shapes
- Distance Grab presets for hand poses
- Hands through Link to quickly animate prompts in the content editor
Meta’s hand-tracking tools have enhanced current hit titles such as Liteboxer, who debuted their VR-specific version on the Meta Quest at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2022 in January.
A Liteboxer executive spoke to XR Today about Meta’s highly-intuitive hand and eye-tracking capabilities, allowing people to replace expensive workout equipment with lightweight VR headsets.
Ultraleap, a leader in hand and eye-tracking with partnerships with some of the world’s top brands, debuted its latest version of its Gemini tool to empower firms with cutting-edge technologies.
