Hand tracking for immersive virtual reality: opportunities and challenges
This is an incremental review paper addressing issues for hardware engineers and software developers in VR.
The paper outlines the main opportunities and challenges of hand tracking in immersive virtual reality, focusing on its value and user-related psychological and neuroscience aspects, aiming to provide a roadmap for best practices in future technology development.
Hand tracking has become an integral feature of recent generations of immersive virtual reality head-mounted displays. With the widespread adoption of this feature, hardware engineers and software developers are faced with an exciting array of opportunities and a number of challenges, mostly in relation to the human user. In this article, I outline what I see as the main possibilities for hand tracking to add value to immersive virtual reality as well as some of the potential challenges in the context of the psychology and neuroscience of the human user. It is hoped that this paper serves as a roadmap for the development of best practices in the field for the development of subsequent generations of hand tracking and virtual reality technologies.