Hand Tracking in HoloLens 2: A Sneak Peak

The Mixed Reality Toolkit Team over at Microsoft has posted a video on YouTube that gives us a great first look at exactly how accurate the HoloLens 2‘s hand tracking and gesture capabilities are. Being a developer of interactive experiences ourselves, any new details about the next HoloLens are very exciting to us!

Judging from this video, it looks like they’re going to blow everything else out of the water! For reference, the previous HoloLens is limited to very few gestures, and it wasn’t aware of where you hands actually are in 3D space. However, we appreciated how accurate and reliable those controls are. In contrast, a headset like the Meta 2 (RIP) had a gesture set similar to what Microsoft is demonstrating above- but they were frustratingly inaccurate and difficult to use in our experience.

It seems like with the HoloLens 2, Microsoft has found a way to achieve the best of both worlds- intuitive controls where you can just reach out and grab holograms, while maintaining the high level of consistent response the controls of the previous generation headset has.

If you’re wondering about why there seems to be an offset between the real life hands and the hologram hands- this is likely due to the RBG camera on the HoloLens being in a different position than the users eyes, which is what the holograms are oriented for. If you were actually using the device, I’d imagine the two sets of hands would be much more closely aligned.

We can’t wait to get our hands on the HoloLens 2 and the new Mixed Reality Toolkit that goes along with it! Are you interested to learn more about how Mixed Reality and elevate your business? Give us a shout!