I may as well go straight for the pun here: I have to hand it to Meta Platforms. The hand tracking update it announced today for the Quest headsets looks to be a serious upgrade. For developers, it promises to make controller-free experiences on Quest a lot more usable with little to no extra work required on their end. The better hand tracking gets, the more it may shape the direction for Meta’s future products and the VR ecosystem as a whole.

Improved hand tracking is a big deal for VR simply because it means there’s less equipment a user is required to deal with (and, perhaps, that a manufacturer like Meta needs to include with a headset). Better hand tracking also has the potential to broaden the kinds of apps that developers can make, potentially making workplace productivity or training apps more intuitive. Of course, hand tracked interactions could also be great for some VR games.