Hand tracking for immersive virtual reality: opportunities and challenges

TL;DR

This paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of hand tracking in immersive virtual reality, emphasizing its potential to enhance user experience and the need to address human-centered issues for future development.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of the main opportunities and challenges in hand tracking for VR, serving as a roadmap for future best practices.

Findings

Identifies key opportunities for enhancing VR with hand tracking

Highlights challenges related to human factors and neuroscience

Suggests directions for future research and development

Abstract

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.