Meta suggests Quest 2 won’t get full-body tracking - but Project Cambria might be

techradar.com:

Full-body tracking won’t be coming to the Meta Quest 2 anytime soon according to a statement from the vice president of Meta Reality Labs, Andrew Bosworth.

In a recent Q&A Bosworth hosted through Instagram (via RoadToVR), he explained that the Quest 2’s design isn’t suited for tracking someone’s legs and feet.

“Body tracking is super tricky because the camera that’s on your face — it can’t see your legs very well,” Bosworth explained, adding that as Meta tries to make the headset’s form factor smaller, “It gets even worse, [the cameras] can’t even see past your cheek sometimes to your upper body.”

Bosworth later explained that the Quest 2’s hand and head tracking data can be extrapolated to accurately determine where a person’s torso and arms are, however the same isn’t true for legs and feet.

These remarks seem to contradict a leak from earlier this month that suggested full-body tracking support had been added to Meta’s Software Development Kit (SDK). However, Bosworth referenced this leak in his Q&A calling it “a little premature… but [full body tracking]’s something that we’re always looking at and have in mind for sure.”

As a result, while it seems unlikely that the feature is coming to the Quest 2, Bosworth’s statements lead us to believe the upcoming Project Cambria headset could be the device to take advantage of full-body tracking instead.

That’s because, as Bosworth explained, the main issue is hardware. The Quest 2 and its accessories aren’t built to accommodate full-body tracking. If Meta did want to implement this feature, Bosworth believes Meta would have to forgo its inside-out tracking method and borrow cues from headsets that use outside-in tracking.

Essentially, rather than having the headset do all the work,