As a Roblox developer, tracking the individual joints of a player’s hand in virtual reality is impossible. The Meta Quest, which Roblox just launched on, supports high-quality hand tracking using its onboard cameras.
I propose Roblox add a VRService API for getting each joint’s position and rotation info on each hand. This solution is significantly smaller in scope than a whole new DynamicHand instance (as proposed here) and offers developers a lot of flexibility in their implementation.
If Roblox can address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I could create more fluid and intuitive interactions, or entire games that don’t even require a controller. For my use case, I want to support hyper-casual social experiences that do not benefit from a controller. Players should be able to interact with 3D panels in the world using just their hands.
As much as I wanna see this happen, I honestly can’t see it getting any use whatsoever.
People having VR headsets to begin with is pretty niche, so there aren’t many VR games out there to begin with.
On top of that, to my knowledge only the Quest can do hand tracking.
And even on top of that, not everyone does hand tracking to begin with for a variety of reasons (me personally because nothing supports it, and for the things that do it feels questionably jank because it’s usually still just controller controls at its core)
There’s just such little demand for it that I can’t see it getting a good grip (heehee)
Considering Roblox is still heavily pushing the whole metaverse idea (even though they don’t want to use that word) they should definitely add this if they really wanted to be as immersive as possible compared to competitors like VRC and such.
This would be a very cool feature but I honestly cannot see this being added any time soon unfortunately. Hand tracking is something very few headsets can do right now and thus I do not think Roblox would find much value in adding it at this current time. Not to mention, but hand tracking also adds a whole new obstacle for Roblox moderation. I think these are also the reasons why Roblox hasn’t gone out of they’re way to add full body tracking either.
Would be a nice feature.
Another nice feature would be if there was a method in Players that allowed a script to read a player’s facial expression (by returning a FaceControls instance) if given the player’s username.