Data Usage Disclaimer: Enabling support for hand tracking grants your app access to certain user data, such as the user’s estimated hand size and hand pose data. This data is only permitted to be used for enabling hand tracking within your app and is expressly forbidden for any other purpose.
The hand tracking feature enables the use of hands as an input method on Oculus Quest devices. It provides a new sense of presence, enhances social engagement, and can help deliver more natural interactions.
The hand tracking feature also allows you to develop UI elements that can be operated with hands and controllers interchangeably. When you opt to use hands, for near-field interactions, users can use their hands to pinch or poke objects. For far-field interactions, the hand’s pose drives a laser cursor-pointer that behaves like the standard controller cursor. Use the cursor-pointer to highlight, select, click, or write your own app-level event logic.
Note that hand tracking complements Touch controllers, but is not intended to replace controllers in all scenarios, particularly with games or creative tools that require a high degree of precision.
This topic contains the following sections:
If you have not previously implemented input motion controllers in Unreal Engine, see UE’s Motion Controller Component Setup.
Before you start implementing hand tracking in your app, see the Hand Tracking Design Guidelines for terminology, best practices and interaction models when using hands as an input source in virtual reality.
There are also store guidelines for how hand tracking should be implemented in your app that you should be familiar with:
For an overview about how hand tracking is implemented and how it has been used in apps, see the OC6 Video Presentation: Hand Tracking Deep Dive: Technology, Design, and Experiences.
The following image shows the architecture of the Oculus hand tracking implementation for UE4, and how it input information from hands is routed using the same mechanism that controller input is routed.
As shown in the diagram, Oculus Input remains the main source of input data for UE4. Oculus Input routes hand input through the UE4 input system the same way that controller buttons and sticks are. Pinches and pinch strength are also routed as hand input.
Hand-specific features like the mesh/skeleton and bone rotation are provided through the OculusHandTracking
class which is contained within the Oculus Input module. The OculusHandTracking
class provides the blueprint library as well as access hand specific data like hand scale, pointer pose, bone rotation, and more.
There are two samples that show how to implement hand tracking using Unreal Engine:
You can turn on hand tracking in Unreal Engine in the Project Settings, which adds the com.oculus.permission.HAND_TRACKING
entry to the Android manifest for your project.
Go to Edit > Project Settings, go to Plugins and select OculusVR. Under Hand Tracking Support, choose:
The Oculus hand tracking integration for Unreal Engine features the following.
In summary, the Oculus input model has these additions for hand tracking:
OculusHandComponent
Specifically:
FOculusHandState
struct has been added. Similar to the controller-state structs, this struct provides the current hand state inputs and tracked state
Register new key names and axes defined for hands in the UE4 input system. These identify fingers of each hand as Thumb, Index, Middle, Ring and Pinky.
Pinches and Pinch strength can be bound to the UE input settings to that their events can be associated with blueprints `OculusHandComponent. See Input Bindings in the next section for how to do this.
GetControllerOrientationAndPosition
to get the root hand positionYou can bind to hand tracking inputs like pinches and pinch strength using Unreal Engine’s input system. To create a new input binding with hand tracking:
The Oculus integration for Unreal Engine offers several resources, including several blueprints.
Blueprint | Description |
---|---|
GetBoneName | Returns the name of the bone from the bone Id |
GetBoneRotation | Returns all bone rotations corresponding to the hand type passed in. |
GetDominantHand | Returns which hand is the dominant user hand |
GetHandPointerPose | Return the current hand pointer pose. |
GetHandScale | Returns the hand scale |
GetSkeletalMeshFromType | Returns a USkeletalMesh for the specified hand. Use the returned mesh to assign to a USkeletalMeshComponent |
GetTrackingConfidence | Returns the tracking confidence of hands. |
InitializeHandPhysics | Initializes physics capsules on the runtime hand mesh |
IsHandTrackingEnabled | Returns true if hand tracking is enabled on the device. |
IsPointerPoseValid | Returns true of the pointer pose is valid |
The Oculus Hand component is the OculusInput
module for hands. This component is a subclass of Unreal’s UPoseableMeshComponent
, and must be a child of UMotionController
, which provides the tracking pose and late-update functionality for hands.
The component handles loading the mesh/skeleton as well as updating the bones. This component also handles setting new materials for the hand, hiding hands when tracking is lost/confidence is low. Options to update root pose, update root scale, set pointer pose root, and enable physics capsules.
The following image shows and example of these properties, and how to set them in UE4.
If the user performs the system gesture, to return to Oculus Home or access the menu, the gesture will be surfaced through the OVRPlugin
as an ovrpButton_Start
signal, and a status flag, similar to the user pressing the Oculus home key or menu button on a controller. You will not need special menu logic for hands in this case.
The following image shows the pinch gesture as well as the system gesture.
Dominant hand features are surfaced through Hand Status flags of the OVRPlugin. You can access this information by using the blueprint function GetDominantHand.