Office hours · All levels · 2 hours · Past session
Office Hours — Hand Tracking
with Alex Coulombe
Fri, Sep 18 · 1pm–3pm ET
Taught live on Zoom and recorded.
About this session
A Friday office hours on hand tracking: untangling OpenXR hands across PCVR streaming setups, then building pinch and open-palm gestures that drive locomotion.
What we covered
This session investigated controllerless hand tracking and gesture-based locomotion in Unreal Engine. Alex Coulombe troubleshot OpenXR hand tracking pipelines across Meta Quest Link, Virtual Desktop, and Steam Link streaming environments. The class concluded with a breakdown of custom Blueprint logic for tracking hand joints, detecting gestures via bone distance thresholds, and driving player movement.
- 01Investigating Meta XR Interaction Toolkit setup and plugin compatibility across Unreal Engine versions.
- 02Debugging OpenXR hand tracking detection using the Get Hand Tracking State Blueprint node.
- 03Troubleshooting PCVR streaming runtimes between SteamVR, Meta Quest Link, and Virtual Desktop.
- 04Testing sample projects and inspecting pawn Blueprints for controllerless hand mesh visualization.
- 05Verifying functional OpenXR hand tracking and grab interactions using Steam Link streaming.
- 06Structuring hand joint tracking using Instanced Static Meshes representing bone keypoints in Blueprints.
- 07Implementing bone distance thresholds on Event Tick to trigger custom gestures like pinching.
- 08Building controllerless locomotion logic that moves the player forward using an open-palm gesture vector.
- 09Comparing Steam Link OpenXR API layers and headset identification settings across client configurations.
AI summary of the session recording's transcript — the recording itself is the source of truth.
