Oculus Quest Update Adds Automatic Hand Tracking Transitioning and Oculus Link Improvements

More than any other virtual reality (VR) headset, 2019 was Oculus Quest’s year – and it wasn’t even a full year! Facebook released two major updates for the standalone device in the latter half of the year, namely Oculus Link and hand tracking. This week further improvements are being rolled out for both, enhancing their functionality. 

Oculus Link

As part of the 13.0 release build Oculus Quest’s hand tracking will receive an option to enable automatic transitioning between hand tracking and controllers, doing away with the clunky menu switching. When switching the other way, users will be able to easily find their controllers by enabling Passthrough.

Additional hand tracking improvements:

  • We’ve added a new step to the Hand Tracking Tutorial that will allow you to practice scrolling with your hands.
  • Remote rendering support for Unity has been added so developers can more easily build and test Hand Tracking apps through their PC.
  • Improved Hand Tracking stability.

When it comes to using Oculus Link a button to enable the feature has been added to the Quest system menu bar, plus there’s now the option to reset the guardian from within Dash while using Oculus Link.

Other tweaks include:

  • Fixed an issue where audio was only audible when Dash was present.
  • Fixed an issue where Home would not load when enabling Oculus Link.
  • Fixed an issue where audio would only work for some users if it was set to 100%.
  • Fixed an issue so you can now replay a video you’ve recorded for abuse reporting purposes before submitting it, while running Oculus Link.
  • Performance and stability updates.

Oculus Quest Lifestyle 5

There are several smaller additions in v13.0 such as updated app search appearance and behaviour, storage manager has had a redesign, user profiles now show the apps that are owned, achievements, and friends, plus parties can now be directly started from a live event’s detail page helping friends get into the event together more efficiently.

Before updating it’s worth noting that if you use Oculus Link both the PC and Oculus Quest versions need to be the same. If you get the Oculus Quest version first then sign up to the Public Test Channel (PTC) to forcibly update your PC. This isn’t possible the other way around, so you may need to wait.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus Quest, reporting back with the latest updates.