Early Review of the Oculus Hand Tracking & Oculus Link

I waited 5+ hours in line at Oculus Connect 6 to demo the Oculus Hand Tracking and Oculus Link so you don’t have to 🙂

There’s been plenty of coverage on these two new technologies already so I’ll (mostly) share what I’ve found that others haven’t talked about.

Oculus Link

Watch the promo video of the Oculus Link here.

• The demo had impressive PCVR-quality graphics!
• There were no consciously perceivable motion-to-photon latency but I did feel simulation sickness afterwards. I don’t get simsick playing similar Quest games (where you’re moving around with the joystick) and I had only spent ~5 minutes in the demo. This leads me to think that the Oculus Link might only be good for those who are immune to sim sickness at least in its current state.
• They didn’t disclose the demo PC’s specs, unfortunately

Oculus Hand Tracking

Watch the promo video of the Oculus Hand Tracking here.

• Difficult hand gestures / poses were tracked flawlessly, such as a closed fist and fast moving individual finger movements (sorry, forgot about doing a ‘finger gun’ gesture!)
• Tracking volume is larger than the FOV of the headset
• Quite a bit of lag in tracking

Here are two videos that show the hand tracking lag to the best of my memory:

(Above: Tracking lag for slow movement)

(Above: Tracking lag for fast movement)

Because of the lag, hand tracking might not be suitable for our game, Gadgeteer, as players might find it difficult to place a grabbed domino in between a row of dominoes with the lag.

• Couldn’t throw objects because of poor fast movement tracking
• Any occlusion of the hand will result in BOTH hands disappearing
• Some jittering of the hands in the game demo even when using hands normally and slowly. This wasn’t the case in the other demo
• Both hands disappear at times when placed close to the ground. Like the above, this only happened in the game demo (FYI: the game demo was much more hardware intensive than the other demo)
• Both hands disappear when one finger touched the finger of the other hand, like so:

  (Above: Performing this action would cause both hands to disappear)

   

  This means we cannot use a menu system where the menu panel is on the hand and menu buttons are on the fingertips (would be great for natural haptic feedback). Will have to resort to something like Leap Motion’s solution where menu buttons are extended away from the hand:

  

• Both hands disappear when 4 or more fingers touch the other hand’s fingers at the tip. Tracking is just fine with 1~3 fingers. A video demonstration here:

  (Above: Tracking is flawless until the index fingers touch in this example. Tracking is lost when the 4th finger is touched; doesn’t matter which finger)

• When hand tracking is lost (i.e. hands are placed out of view from the headset) and regained, the hands reappear quickly and in the right place without any perceivable drift

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