Are you wondering if Oculus finger tracking will come to Rift S?

We reached out to Facebook with this question, and received the following response:

We started with the Quest platform first – and we’re going to listen to the feedback from Quest and will look at tackling the technical challenges of bringing it to other devices.

Finger tracking was announced for Oculus Quest today during the Oculus Connect 6 main keynote. But strangely, despite also having onboard cameras (the same cameras in fact) the Rift S was not mentioned during this announcement.

Given that the Rift S is powered by a gaming PC which is significantly more powerful than Quest, this is surprising. Especially since Oculus CTO John Carmack essentially stated earlier this year that Rift S could support the technology.

So what “technical challenges” is Facebook referring to? The only explanation we can think of would be that hardware acceleration features of the Snapdragon’s Hexagon DSP or Spectra ISP are fundamental to getting this working in real time. Perhaps achieving this quality in software on a regular CPU would just use up the resources of even a gaming PC. If that’s the case, it will require serious optimization or new hardware to arrive on PC.

But it may also simply be a business decision. The potential market for Quest is significantly larger, and it’s clear that this is the headset Facebook is putting its full focus on. With Quest soon able to double as a basic PC headset, bringing finger tracking to Rift S may just not be high on Facebook’s priority list.