Quest 3’s new Wide Motion Mode expands the volume of hand tracking.
It does this by constantly running inside out upper body tracking in the background. When a hand is occluded or out of the view of all the tracking cameras, Wide Motion Mode will estimate the hand position based on the rest of your arm.
This might enable hand tracking to support wide motion actions previously only possible with controllers, such as throwing, grabbing items from your back, or Gorilla Tag and Echo VR style locomotion.
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Footage of Inside-Out Upper Body Tracking (from Meta)
Of course, the movement of your fingers can’t be estimated in this way, so fingers will remain frozen until the hand comes back into the view of a tracking camera. Handling this could be a challenge for developers in games. Wide Motion Mode also can’t be used with Multimodal Mode.
As with the Inside-Out Body Tracking feature that powers it, Wide Motion Mode only works with Quest 3, though Meta notes it will also work on all future headsets.
