All Hands on Deck: Crank up Hand Responsiveness and Unlock New Gameplay with Hands 2.2

With the release of v56, Hand Tracking on Meta Quest is getting a major upgrade. We’re excited to announce Hands 2.2, which delivers improved hand responsiveness and brand-new experimental capabilities.

With Hands 2.2, we’re drastically reducing the user experience gap between controllers and hands to support improved responsiveness across the board—including up to 40% latency reduction in typical usage and up to 75% during fast movement. In addition, apps that rely on fast movement like those in the fitness and rhythm category can now turn on Fast Motion Mode (FMM) to make fast-paced games even more responsive. No action is needed to benefit from Hands 2.2 beyond updating the headset to v56.

But that’s not all. With SDK v56 on Meta Quest Pro, you also have access to simultaneous hands and controllers (Multimodal) and controller-driven hand pose (Capsense Hands), two new experimental features you can explore to deepen immersion and unlock new gameplay.

With these upgrades and more on the way with Meta Quest 3 launching later this year, now is the perfect time to integrate or upgrade Hand Tracking in your VR and MR apps. Dive in below for more details, use cases, and examples showing off improvements that you can replicate in your own apps. Be sure to mark your calendars for Meta Connect on September 27 for more information on Quest 3 and future improvements for Hand Tracking.

Earlier this year, Hands 2.1 gave you the support to reduce tracking loss and predict future positions better than ever before. Since then, we’ve rolled up our sleeves to make Hand Tracking almost as responsive as controllers.

We’re also introducing Fast Motion Mode (FMM), an evolution of high-frequency tracking, with additional improvements designed to make fast-paced games even more responsive. Try out the Move Fastdemo app and refer to the Unity, Unreal, and Native documentation to enable FMM on your app today.

With Integration SDK v56, you can experiment with new features designed to increase immersion and unlock new gameplay. With your feedback, we’ll continue improving these features to support deeper immersion on Quest 2 and Quest Pro—and deliver an amazing experience for your users on Quest 3.

You can get started with both of these experimental features by checking out the documentation for Multimodal and Capsense Hands.

Hand Tracking gives your app’s users the ability to engage with their VR or mixed reality environment in a way that is natural and intuitive. These interactions deepen the immersive experience and help people feel more connected to what’s going on around them in-headset. Hands can also provide a faster on ramp for users new to VR. By integrating Hand Tracking in your existing apps, you can give your users more flexibility to tailor their experience and find what works best for them—and thanks to Hands 2.2, you can feel confident knowing your app’s users will enjoy a great experience regardless of whether they play with hands or controllers.

If you’re looking to build a new app that takes advantage of the latest technology and hardware on Quest 3, Hands 2.2 delivers major upgrades in responsiveness that scale with increasingly fast movements—the perfect conditions to create a fitness app that Meta Quest users will love.

To set up Hand Tracking, please check out our documentation.

We’re excited to offer you even more Hand Tracking upgrades in the near future, so follow us on Twitter and Facebook, and tune in for Meta Connect on September 27!