Your Oculus Quest controllers are used not just to control games, but also to navigate through the menus of your Quest or Quest 2 headset. But what happens if you can’t use your controllers for some reason?
Your Quest includes a handy feature called Hand Tracking that lets you use your hands in place of the controllers. Here’s how to use it and what you can control.
What Is Oculus Hand Tracking?
Hand Tracking is a function of your Oculus Quest 2 or Quest headset that lets you use your hands to control basic menu functions. It uses the cameras on your headset to detect your hands and fingers, using them for input.
This isn’t meant to take the place of the controllers, as navigating with your hands isn’t as fluid as using the controllers. However, hand tracking comes in handy in certain situations. For example, if your controllers are in another room and you want to quickly check something on your headset, you can use hand tracking to navigate.
Read more: Things You Must Do When You First Get an Oculus Quest 2
It’s not intended for most games, since your hands don’t have a joystick and multiple buttons. Despite this, there are a few games that do support the function, such as Cubism. Look for Hand Tracking in the Supported Controllers section of a game's store page to confirm.
How to Enable Hand Tracking on Oculus Quest
To use Hand Tracking on your Quest, you need to have the feature enabled. To see if it is, press the Oculus button on your right controller to open the menu. Select the clock icon on the left side of the menu to open the Quick Settings panel.
On this panel, choose Settings to open the full options menu. Then go to Device > Hands and Controllers. Here, under Hands, make sure Hand Tracking is on.
If you leave the Auto Switch setting on, your Quest will automatically decide to use your hands or controllers for input. When you put the controllers down, it will use your hands. Then when you pick a controller back up, it will switch to those again.
Disable this setting if you want to manually toggle the hand tracking setting each time. To do this, use the Hand Tracking icon that appears in the Quick Settings menu mentioned earlier.
How to Use Oculus Quest Hand Tracking
Once you’ve turned on Hand Tracking, put your controllers down and move your hands in front of your face, in view of the headset. You may see a notification that your Quest has switched to Hand Tracking, and will see your hands in VR similar to how the controllers appear.
Now you can use the following gestures to navigate:
- To select something, point your hand at the item you want to interact with. Pinch your thumb and index finger together to select (the same as hitting the trigger on your controller).
- To scroll on a menu, point somewhere on the page that’s not a selectable button. Then pinch your thumb and index finger together. Keep them together while moving your hand up or down to scroll vertically, or left and right to scroll horizontally. Release your fingers to stop scrolling.
- To show the main menu, turn your palm to face you around eye level. Then bring your thumb and index finger together; you’ll see the Oculus icon if you do it right. After pinching your fingers together, release them when the menu appears.
- To access a menu with shortcuts, including muting your microphone, recording a video, and summoning the voice assistant, perform the above gesture but keep your thumb and finger together. While holding them, move over the menu item you want, then release.
Oculus says there’s an additional Hand Tracking gesture you can use while watching Oculus TV, though we couldn’t get this to work in our testing. Hold your palm face-up, and you’ll see a laser pointer. Once a control menu appears, pinch to select the controls you want to use.
Unfortunately, this gesture doesn’t work in third-party apps like Netflix. It’s limited to the stock Oculus TV app.
Get a Grip With Oculus Hand Tracking
We’ve seen how to enable Hand Tracking and use it as an alternative to the Oculus Quest controllers. It’s not a perfect feature, but it provides a convenient alternative for quick navigation if you don’t want to break out your controllers.
If you like the idea, check out the available Hand Tracking games to see what clever developers have come up with. Meanwhile, if you’re new to the Quest, you should be aware of everything your device is capable of.
