Oculus Quest VR adds hand tracking for one-year anniversary

By Chris Morris May 18, 2020

Oculus Quest owners are going to be able to do a lot more with their hands in the coming months.

The Facebook-owned VR company announced Monday, May 18 that hand tracking on Quest will go from an experimental feature to general release this week.

The first third-party games allowing players to interact with virtual worlds without using controllers will be in stores starting May 28.

It’s a big leap forward to Oculus, which is celebrating the one-year anniversary of the Quest. By incorporating the use of real hands into games, VR becomes more accessible to a wider group of users, who may be intimidated by current controllers.

Four games (all created by Oculus) currently utilize hand tracking in its experimental phase and are available now in the Oculus Store.

To date, Quest owners have spend $100 million on VR content for the system. More than 20 games have made more than $1 million each and over 10 have topped $2 million in revenues on Quest.

While Oculus did not give out sales numbers, one of the flagship games for the system has been Beat Saber. To keep that momentum going, the developers of that game announced plans to launch 20 new beatmaps on May 25 in a free update — 10 with 360-degree support and 10 with one-saber support.

Tracks will include Green Day’s American Idiot”and Timbaland’s While We’re Young.

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Chris Morris has covered consumer technology and the video game industry since 1996, offering analysis of news and trends and…

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