Oculus Quest will soon play Rift games and receive hand tracking
The wireless VR headset Oculus Quest receives two major updates. With the Rift Link, the Quest will soon be able to play all Rift games and, on top of that, it will learn hand tracking.
The Oculus Quest will have access to the entire Oculus Rift library from November. This will be possible with the Rift Link. After this update, all you have to do is connect the VR glasses to your PC using a USB-C cable. This was announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the Oculus Connect 6 conference. This turns the standalone headset into a fully-fledged PC headset. Although it will lose some of its mobility, the range of games will be massively expanded. Thanks to the power of the PC, you also benefit from a significant leap in quality. This makes the Oculus Rift practically superfluous.
And there was another interesting new announcement at Oculus Connect. The Quest is getting a potentially killer feature: hand tracking. The monochrome camera sensors recognise the shape of your hands and create a series of 3D points. This in turn allows your movements to be transferred to VR. At the conference, participants were able to try out a short demo and the initial feedback has been extremely positive. However, it is up to the developers to implement this feature in their products. The update is planned for 2020.
Being the game and gadget geek that I am, working at digitec and Galaxus makes me feel like a kid in a candy shop – but it does take its toll on my wallet. I enjoy tinkering with my PC in Tim Taylor fashion and talking about games on my podcast http://www.onemorelevel.ch. To satisfy my need for speed, I get on my full suspension mountain bike and set out to find some nice trails. My thirst for culture is quenched by deep conversations over a couple of cold ones at the mostly frustrating games of FC Winterthur.