The Oculus Quest is going truly standalone way sooner than expected

The Oculus Quest standalone VR handset will gain the ability to track your hands well ahead of schedule.

The Facebook-owned company has confirmed the tech, which will allow you to see representations of your own hands moving in the virtual space, will become available to Quest owners as soon as this week.

Announced at the f8 Conference in September, and scheduled to arrive in early 2020, the feature negates the need to use the two controllers as input methods when engaging in virtual reality experiences.

In a press release, Oculus said it was excited to share that “we’ll be rolling out an initial version of hand tracking as an early feature for consumers on Oculus Quest this week.”

• Updated: read our Oculus Rift S review

The idea is to make everything feel a little more natural and perhaps less inhibiting to those jumping into the virtual world for the first time, rather than having to master a controller they can’t even see.

Better still, this will not require additional sensors to be added to your gaming space. The Quest already has built-in sensors that can detect and track your hands. Here’s the company’s preview from the f8 Conference a few months back:

The firm hasn’t announced which games and experiences will support hand tracking at launch, but it’s perhaps more likely that future experiences will benefit from the tech rather than older titles. So you could be boxing and using bow and arrows and all manner of other fun stuff in VR before you know it.

In our review of the £399 Oculus Quest we praised the pick up and play nature of the system, while the all-in-one system made it the best virtual reality headset money could buy. We afforded it 4.5 stars.

“If VR is ever going to hit the mainstream, this is the headset to pull in the masses,” our reviewer opined.