April Oculus Developer Recap

This has been a busy month for the developer community. We kicked off April with App Subscriptions, followed that up with an ODH update, began rolling out v28, and finished the month with High Frequency Hand Tracking. With so much going on, you may have missed one or two juicy bits of information. Take a look back at our developer blog posts from April:

Be Generous: VR Design Tips to Reduce Player Frustration
The goal of interaction design is to provide appropriate ranges and buffers around some action so that users can be 'close enough,' and in more complex implementations, predict player intent so that they're less likely to perform an action they don't expect.

Oculus Developer Hub Update 1.7
The latest release for Oculus Developer Hub (ODH) includes new capabilities and improvements to several existing features that will improve your daily development workflow.

App Subscriptions: Enabling New App Categories and Ongoing Support
Starting today, Quest apps on the Oculus Store can offer subscriptions for new, exclusive, and bundled content for a recurring payment via our new subscription API.

How to Run a Perfetto Trace on Oculus Quest or Quest 2
Perfetto is an Android system-wide profiling tool (as of Android 10) that provides information on system events such as scheduling activity, in addition to app-level instrumentation for apps that integrate with Perfetto or ATrace.

Oculus Launch Pad Grads Dylan Paré, Scout Windsor and John Craig Share the Creative Process Behind Mementorium
2019 Launch Pad grant recipients Dylan Paré, Scout Windsor, and John Craig spoke with us about their involvement with Oculus Launch Pad and how it helped shape their career and the development of Mementorium, a heartfelt story about identity and belonging told through a branching narrative in virtual reality.

Introducing High Frequency Hand Tracking
With High Frequency Hand Tracking, you can upgrade to more robust and reliable gesture detection, stable hand depiction, and latency improvements of about 10%. This improvement creates a more immersive experience and moves closer to a seamless replication of natural movement within VR.

For UE4 developers, we are introducing Hand Pose Recognition Showcase, a relatively simple system that can recognize hand poses and gestures using the raw hand bone information from our High Frequency Hand Tracking system.

Adding Hand Tracking to First Steps
The original First Steps introduced new Quest users to the magic of VR, Touch controllers, and an untethered, 6DOF experience through immersive play that includes interacting with objects, shooting in a gun range, and dancing with a robot.

Because of its reliance on hand-centric interaction and near-field object manipulation mechanics, we added hand tracking (the ability to use your hands in place of touch controllers) to First Steps to learn about the potential of hand tracking integration and the challenges of adding “real hands” to an existing app.

Hand Tracking in Tiny Castles
Tiny Castles is an "action puzzle game" built from the ground up, using hand-tracking as the primary input. It was developed internally by the Facebook Reality Lab Oculus Strike Team to test necessary interactions for a hands-only game experience.

To illustrate some of the possibilities with these new updates, Tiny Castles integrated High Frequency Hand Tracking, along with recent updates from the Hands API including far- and near-field gesture mechanics and custom hand meshes.

Oculus Developer Release Notes: v28
Check out the latest developer release notes.

How to Obtain Stable GPU Measurements on Quest
When developing for Quest, it is important to get accurate and repeatable measurements of GPU frame time on an app. Oculus software engineer Rémi Palandri shares his method.

If you have any questions or if there are other topics that you’d like us to cover in the blog, please let us know in the comments below.