Feb 20, 2024

Discover the benefits of new hand tracking capabilities available in SDK v62

We are excited to announce two new Presence Platform hand tracking capabilities are now available in SDK v62: Multimodal and Wide Motion Mode. Multimodal allows simultaneous hands and controller tracking, unlocking new gameplay opportunities and seamless transitions. Wide Motion Mode provides robust tracking even outside of a user’s field of view, improving social presence and wide motion interactions. In addition, v62 includes significant improvements to make development of hand interactions easier than ever.

Unlocking new Presence Platform capabilities

Multimodal

Multimodal provides simultaneous tracking of both hands and controllers, which unlocks new hand and controller combinations resulting in novel gameplay. Now, transitions from hands to controllers and back again are instant. You can also improve social presence in your app when using one controller only, allowing users to be expressive with their free hand.

For example, does your experience only require one controller? You could use one controller as a racket, but leverage the free hand to throw the ball. Users can wave with one hand while still using the other active controller, allowing for more engagement and true representation of a user’s expression. There’s no need to be torn between optimizing for controller accuracy and haptics and hands immersion. Use one controller as the main weapon, while leveraging the free hand to interact with objects or signal actions.

With seamless transitions between controllers and hands, we invite you to think about how different players and gameplay scenarios can unfold as you’re developing new experiences. Multimodal is currently supported on Quest Pro, Quest 3 and Quest 2 (with Pro controllers), in Unity and Native. We’re excited to see what you come up with!

Wide Motion Mode (WMM)

Turn on WMM to benefit from hand position tracking even when outside the headset’s field of view by leveraging body tracking data. Wide Motion Mode can improve your users' experience by providing tracking that allows for more natural movements, improving gameplay and social presence.

The possibilities where WMM could be applied are endless, but if you’re using hands for social gestures, you could turn on WMM to help users express themselves more naturally, garnering a more accurate representation of their actual movements. Any gameplay that would require wide hand motions with sports movements, swords, dancing, or even something as simple as putting on a backpack can now have more reliable gestures and interactions.

WMM is currently supported on Quest 3 in Unity and Native, and we can’t wait to see how you incorporate it in your experiences.

Capsense hands

Capsense hands provide a simple way to generate hand poses based on controller signals. Use the new capsense API to easily generate either natural hand poses or held controller poses to increase user immersion, so you can focus on gameplay. Capsense hands are supported on Quest 2, Quest Pro and Quest 3 devices, in Unity, Native and unreal.

Easier to Implement Than Ever Before

Streamlining Interactions

On the Presence Platform team we've heard your feedback, and we've worked hard to make ISDK v62 significantly easier to use. Our goal is to reduce the time it takes to set up interactions in a new Unity project from hours to minutes. Here’s how to get started:

Quick Actions Menu: Streamline your workflow with a centralized menu for all ISDK actions. Simply right-click on an object in your scene and use the new Quick Actions Menu to make it interactable.

Comprehensive Sample: Access a complete, up-to-date sample scene that demonstrates all ISDK features including grabbing, poking, raycasting, transforming, and locomoting.