Meta’s Quest Pro can track now your tongue, but it’s not the update the headset needs most
The Meta Quest Pro has received an unexpected update: the face tracking can now follow your tongue movements.
One of the most important hardware upgrades in the Meta Quest Pro is facial and eye tracking. Thanks to the built-in cameras, the headset can track your facial features and translate your real-life movements into a virtual avatar. Because it perfectly mimics your mouth flaps, nose twitches and eye movements, the digital model can sometimes feel almost as alive as a real human – at least in my experience with the technology.
Unfortunately, this immersion can fail at certain points as the tracking is not always perfect, with one flaw noted by many users: it cannot track your tongue. So if you wanted to tease one of your friends by reaching out to them, or lick a virtual ice cream cone, you couldn't do that until now.
Meta has released a new version of the face tracking extension in its v60 SDK, which finally adds support for tongue tracking. Interestingly, this support hasn't been added to meta avatars yet – so you might not see tongue tracking in apps like Horizon Worlds – but it's already being added by developers to third-party apps.
New #VRCFT modules released for new #QuestPro v2 facial tracking with tongue support. Supports (Air)Link and VD over VDX (when VD adds support) using the ALXR Local module and ALXR clients using the ALXR Remote module You can download from here https //t.co/F37U2zA8is#VRChat pic. twitter.com/sUmfLaXVpNDecember 14, 2023
This includes developer Korean (through Upload VR) who are developing a VR Face Tracking module for ALXR – an alternative to apps like Virtual Desktop and Quest Link, which let you connect your headset to a PC. Korejan has posted a video of how it works on X (formerly Twitter).
All the stuff and nothing to do with it
Meta improving the capabilities of its technology is never a bad thing, and we should see tongue tracking roll out to more apps soon – especially once Meta's own Avatar SDK gains support for the feature. But this isn't the upgrade the feature needs. Instead, face tracking needs to get into the hands of more people, and there needs to be more software that uses it.
Before Meta Quest 3 was released, I rarely used mixed reality – the only times I did was as part of reviews or tests I did for work. That's changed a lot in recent months, and I'd even go so far as to say that mixed reality is sometimes my favorite way to play when there's a choice between VR and MR.
One reason is that the Quest 3 offers significantly higher quality throughput than the Quest Pro. It's still not perfect, but the colors are more accurate and the input isn't ruined by grain. The other, much more important reason is that the platform is now packed with software that offers mixed reality support, rather than just a few niche mixed reality apps to complement the main VR experience.
Even though they've been after Meta hardware for just as long, there isn't the same support for face tracking or eye tracking. That's despite all the talk before the Quest Pro came out about how much realism these tools can add, and how much more efficiently apps could run using foveated rendering – a technique where VR software properly renders only the part of the scene you're looking at . with your eyes.
The big problem isn't that face tracking isn't good enough – if it can track your tongue it's certainly impressive – it's (probably) the Quest Pro's poor sales. Meta hasn't said how well or poorly the Pro has performed financially, but you don't need to permanently cut the price of a product by a third just four months after launch if it's selling like hotcakes – it dropped from $1,500 / £1,500 / AU$2,450 to $999.99 / £999.99 / AU$1,729.99. And if not many people have this headset and its tracking tools, why would developers waste resources creating apps that use it when they could be working on something that more people could benefit from?
For face tracking to become a success like mixed reality, it needs to be brought to Meta's budget Quest line so that more people have access to it, and developers are incentivized to create software that can take advantage of it. Until then, face tracking, no matter how impressive it becomes, will remain a marginal tool.