How to improve hand tracking on the Oculus Quest

The Oculus Quest recently gained preview support for hand tracking. The feature allows you to navigate menus and even play some games with nothing but your hands. It's a new and exciting feature for the Oculus Quest, but it's still in its early stages and doesn't always work. There are a few things you can do to help get the best hand tracking experience.

Products used in this guide

• Standalone VR: Oculus Quest ($400 at Best Buy)
• Darkness my old friend: Mellons Unisex Winter Knit Classic Solid Color Gloves (black) ($7 at Amazon)

Light it up

The Oculus Quest's hand tracking works with the headset's monochrome cameras. This is great because that means it doesn't require any external hardware. However, it also means that hand tracking on the Oculus Quest isn't as precise as dedicated VR gloves, at least for now. Oculus uses AI to make the experience better, but there's still some work to do.

To get the best hand tracking experience, you need to have enough light for the cameras to see you. If you go into an area that is too dark, the Oculus Quest will show an error message that tells you to adjust your lighting. It doesn't have to be as bright as the sun to work— in fact, you shouldn't use the Oculus Quest outside— but you need enough light in the room.

In my house, most rooms are lit by a single light bulb, and hand tracking works fine. In my testing, I went into our brightest room, which has multiple light fixtures and two large windows. Hand tracking worked as well in this room as I've seen it work.

Bundle up

Because hand tracking on the Oculus Quest utilizes monochrome cameras, a pair of black gloves can help the cameras see your hands just a bit better. The black gloves increase the contrast between your hands and the background, resulting in slightly improved tracking. Don't expect a pair of gloves to make the Oculus Quest's hand tracking feel like dedicated VR gloves, but these Mellons winter gloves, or gloves like them, helped improve hand tracking a bit.

In my testing, I noticed less jittering and slightly improved finger tracking. It's worth noting that the background of my room is light, but the effect seemed to work even when I went into darker rooms.

Early stages

Hand tracking is in its infancy on the Oculus Quest. The feature is still in preview, and developers haven't had a long time to play with it and put it into games and apps. At the moment, hand tracking works in the Oculus Quest's main menu and within a few select games. If you want to test out hand tracking, your best bet is to check out some games available through Sidequest, like Tea for God.