Moses Turner
February 24, 2023
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In our previous blog post, I teased our new optical hand tracking pipeline, codenamed Mercury. Work on this tracking method began around January 2022.
Now, after a little over a year of development, it's finally ready for the public to use!
Mercury currently works on Valve Index, Windows Mixed Reality headsets (Reverb G2 v2 shown below), Oculus Rift S (early support), and Luxonis cameras (video shows a OAK-D Pro W Dev mounted on a North Star). It estimates hand pose accurately, supports limited hand-over-hand interactions, tracks fast hand movements, and is useable for drawing, typing and UI interaction.
Usage documentation is here if you want to run it in Monado. Expect in the coming few weeks some improvements to hand tracked-state stability, reductions to background jitter, a SteamVR driver so you can use it on Windows, and a much more detailed blog post showcasing the work we did to get here!
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