While most of the best VR headsets are only capable of tracking head and hand movements, this could soon change for the Oculus Quest 2 and future Oculus hardware.
As discovered by Upload VR, the most recent release of the Software Development Kit (SDK) – a set of tools designed to help the platform’s game and app developers – includes an option for ‘body tracking support’.
There’s been no official word from Meta (formerly Facebook, the company that owns Oculus) on this feature and it declined to comment when asked by Upload VR, so the details about its implementation are up for speculation.
The ability to track a user’s hands was added to the Oculus Quest in late 2019 via a software update, so it’s certainly possible that the Oculus Quest 2 could receive a similar treatment with body tracking capabilities.
If this were the case, it’s unclear how exactly the body tracking would function. The Quest 2 does feature a pair of wide-angle, downward facing cameras, but their field of view would only cover the front of a user’s torso and legs when looking down.
Another possibility is that the feature could be intended for the Oculus Quest Pro (AKA Project Cambria), a high-end virtual reality and augmented reality hybrid headset that Meta has announced for a 2022 release.
While we don’t know which device will receive body tracking capability, nor when it will land, this latest leak strongly suggests we’ll be seeing it soon on an Oculus device.
The ability to track the full movements of a user’s body would allow for a great deal of versatility in the VR world – whether it’s for fitness apps that can track particular motions or more accurate avatar movement in the virtual space.
