PSVR 2 gets surprise hand tracking update, and Sony should be making a bigger deal of it

Sony has announced PSVR 2 hand trackingBut it’s done so at a booth at the Siggraph Asia show, and seemingly nowhere elseIt’s already in the PS5 SDK, so keep an eye out for hand tracking coming to your favorite PSVR 2 titles

Sony has dropped a major update for the PlayStation VR 2 headset: hand tracking. But oddly it announced the feature in the most low-key way it could – via a written description on a booth at a tech show.

At the Siggraph 2024 Asia computer graphics and interactive tech expo in Tokyo, attendees can experience PSVR 2 without using any kind of controller, with a video of the demo (see below) showing a player shooting water jets from their fingers to take out flying monsters. And as long as your hands are in view of the headsets’ cameras it will be able to track them in virtual reality.

According to UploadVR, a description posted on the booth explains that hand tracking is available with “the latest SDK of PlayStation 5” which means that game devs could start incorporating hand tracking into their games right now. The description adds that the tracking rate is at a smooth 60fps with low latency.

There’s also a brief mention of the hand tracking feature buried in an overview of Sony’s demos and announcements at Siggraph 2024.

Now we wait for updates

While controllers can’t always be replaced in VR experiences – their buttons provide quick access to features that would be clunky to incorporate otherwise – for games that could rely on hand tracking there’s nothing quite like the immersion it provides.

Hand tracking is also so much more intuitive to VR and gaming newcomers – it’s a lot easier to reach out and grasp something than to perform even simple button movements. It’s frankly a major feature announcement, and I’m shocked that Sony hasn’t made a bigger deal of hand tracking’s arrival.

It will require developers to incorporate the updated SDK into their software, but if any third-party games and apps already support hand tracking on headsets that support the feature (like Meta’s Quests) then it hopefully shouldn’t take much time or effort to port hand-tracking to the PSVR 2 version.

So if you decided to pick up a PSVR 2 headset over Black Friday while it was $250-off (or you own one already) be on the lookout for some hand tracking updates to your favorite titles in the coming months – and hopefully we’ll see not just updates, but also some brand-new VR experiences.

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