From gesturing and communicating with others to picking up and manipulating objects, our hands play an important role in how we interact with the world—and they’re key to unlocking the feeling of true presence in a virtual space. We first brought your hands into VR with Oculus Touch controllers, so you could engage in VR in a more natural way. Now, we’re taking the next step with hand tracking on Oculus Quest—letting you interact in VR without controllers, using your real hands.

Just in time for the holidays, we’re releasing hand tracking as an early consumer feature on Quest starting this week, and as an SDK for developers next week. Simply update your Quest software to v12 when it rolls out to you, then turn on hand tracking in the Experimental Features menu to be among the first to try it. In this initial release, you can use your hands to navigate and interact within Quest’s Home interfaces like Library and Store, plus in select first-party apps like the Oculus Browser and Oculus TV. You can even set your floor height for a stationary Guardian boundary using your hands—no controller necessary. To switch between your hands and Touch controllers, just use the new toggle switch in your Oculus Home menu. And this is just the beginning. We’ll continue to add new features and functionality to improve the experience of hand tracking on Quest in 2020.

What’s more, with the new SDK rolling out next week, developers and creators now have the power to unlock controller-free hand interactions in Quest apps for the first time. We can’t wait to see what kinds of content they’ll dream up and ship as they build new experiences with hands: from more expressive gestures in social apps to more efficient workflows in business training modules, and more. We hope hand tracking will make VR more approachable for newcomers to try by removing the need to learn controller functions. And for those who own Quest, when the hardware melts away you can be fully immersed in the magic of VR while connecting with others in a seamless, intuitive way.

With the holidays coming up, we’re excited to hear from new members of the community as they unwrap their Quests—and from everyone as they get hands-on with hand tracking for the very first time. As more and more experiences on the Oculus platform support hand tracking over time, this is one gift that will keep on giving.