Imagine not being able to touch or manipulate anything directly, and instead having to interact with the world by pressing buttons and wiggling your thumb to control everything. That’s AR and VR without hand tracking.
Apple Vision Pro Review – Why Does This EXIST?
Apple is working on adding hand and eye tracking to its upcoming augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) headset, which would differentiate it from existing headsets that require users to grab a controller to interact with the virtual world as if they were using a game console. That’s fine for VR games, but when it comes to overlaying virtual data and objects on the real world, it’s a major hindrance. Not only that, hand tracking could do a lot that game controllers can’t, just like using your hands in the real world.
"Let's say you're watching a movie on an HMD [head-mounted display] and you want to fast forward. It's much easier to do that with a flick of your wrist than looking around to figure out where to 'click.' Your remote that likes to disappear into the couch is now in your hands," Eric Alexander, founder and CEO of Soundscape VR, told Lifewire via email.
Apple doesn’t often come up with completely new products. It just does existing products better than anyone else. The portable computer was more of a portable computer until Apple invented the clamshell laptop format that we still use today. Likewise, there were touchscreen phones before the iPhone, tablets before the iPad, MP3 players before the iPod, and so on.
