Hand tracking in Waltz of the Wizard — Unedited gameplay footage & tracking tips
Today we are very excited to release the hand-tracking update for Waltz of the Wizard on Oculus Quest. Since its unveiling a few months ago, we have been working hard on making it the best experience possible and have been amazed by the advances made by Oculus’ hand tracking team.
We have created a set of unique features to give you a sense of truly wielding magical powers with your own bare hands. Snap your fingers to make objects in your line-of-sight explode, pour giant potions over your hands to enlarge your fingers, interact with a shape-precise water surface or make googly-eyes appear on your hands with hand-puppet poses!
To celebrate the release, we are publishing 5 minutes of unedited gameplay footage recorded at Aldin to help give people a sense for what the experience is like in good conditions — so video includes flaws and all!
We are actively working on improvements and extensions to the content we are introducing today, and as always we welcome all feedback and suggestions for improvements. Our recently launched Discord is a great place for that!
Hand Tracking Tips & Troubleshooting
With current hand-tracking on Oculus’ OS17 there are certain things you can do to help ensure a good tracking experience. We’ve collected a few points that may help generally improve the experience.
- Try another room. Not all real-world spaces are well suited to current generation hand-tracking. Try comparing performance by going to another physical location, like another room in your house.
- Bright lighting. Be in a brightly lit environment but be aware that some types of lightbulbs have flicker that are imperceivable to the naked eye but perceivable by cameras and potentially interfere. We included a photo above to show conditions where tracking performs well.
- Daylight. If you have windows in your room, compare having the blinds up and blinds down. Certain types of daylight can interfere (direct sunlight especially), but in some cases it can help.
- Clean the camera lenses. This is good practice in general every now and again for your Quest headset.
- Background. Sometimes your environment can make it harder for the headset to make out your hands. Try physically rotating around in your room while watching your hands, see if any particular direction/background is problematic.
- Hands. It’s theoretically possible that things like colored nail polish can interfere with tracking accuracy, but this is more of a side consideration.
- Camera passthrough. Passthrough can help you better understand what the cameras are seeing; like over-brightness or things like infrared lighting. Double tap the side of the headset to enable passthrough.
