Oculus Quest 2 developers can now activate a new “high frequency hand tracking” mode in their apps that increases the tracking rate from 30 Hz to 60 Hz.
Facebook claims the mode increases hand tracking quality and reduces end-to-end latency by 10%. The internal ‘Strike Team’ activated the new mode in the Tiny Castles demo and reported the following results:
“In Tiny Castles, we observed that high-frequency hand tracking resulted in a slight decrease in perceived latency, but also significantly improved the tracking quality for fast hand movements. No changes in jitter or occlusion were noticed. “
However, Facebook says that there is a “slight increase in jitter” in poor lighting conditions, which it plans to fix in a future software update.
Developers can enable high frequency hand tracking by adding this line to the Android manifest:
Oculus Apps can set the CPU and GPU clock speed – not to a specific value, but to 5 predefined levels (0-4). This allows developers to balance performance and battery life.
The high frequency hand tracking requires more processing power in the background to process the cameras at twice the normal rate. According to Facebook, this can cause the headset to overheat (resulting in a sudden shutdown). To avoid this, apps that use this feature are limited to CPU & GPU Level 2.
That said, while enabling this feature is technically a one-line change, it can take significant tweaking to get it to work in real-world apps.
According to Facebook, apps with low-frequency hand tracking will also be limited to CPU and GPU level 3 in the future to avoid overheating.
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