Status Update - March 31, Hand Tracking Progress

Hi everyone! Here's another status update focused on the hand tracking coming to kemorig.

Hand Tracking in kemorig

I've been hard at work implementing Ultraleap hand tracking in kemorig. The above video shows how it's looking so far on my PC. This is exciting!

This is a big feature and it's still not done. I'm determined to implement it right the first time, and make it easy to use and polished for its first release.

Ultraleap does provide an Unreal Engine plugin, which I'm thankful for, but it's far from plug-and-play. Just like every other tracking method so far, working with a new API is tricky and it takes a lot of work to turn the tracking data into something actually usable with custom avatars. Hands, arms, and fingers are fairly complex bits on a character -- this is really stretching my math chops with the animation code! But I like animation work; I've been posting some wacky animation results on my bluesky if you're interested.

Part of why this is tricky is because, unlike the existing head tracking, this requires a mix of local-space and component-space animation logic. Basically, some stuff moves bones relative to their parent (e.g. finger rotation), and some stuff moves bones freely in the world (moving the hands to a position, and having IK rotate the arm bones to follow).

I also want to keep kemorig easy to use, so all of this logic is getting put in the one "Kemorig Tracking" node you're used to. This requires doing some advanced stuff with Unreal animation nodes to put different types of animation logic all in one node.

Coming in April

The hand tracking update should be ready sometime in April! Hopefully it will have been worth the wait.

Thanks everyone. For reading this far here's a picture of proto playing Wii: