Quest Pro’s face tracking now includes your tongue.
In our review of Quest Pro last year, we pointed out how sticking out your tongue would break the illusion when looking in a virtual mirror to see your facial expressions. Not having it also limits expressiveness in social VR.
Quest Pro’s original face tracking, without tongue.
In version 60 of its SDKs for Unity and native code, Meta has released a new version of its face tracking OpenXR extension which now includes how far stuck out your tongue is.
The Meta Avatars SDK hasn’t been updated to support this yet, but third-party avatar solutions can do so after updating their SDK version to 60.
korejan demonstrating Quest Pro tongue tracking via their VRFCT module.
ALVR developer korejan has already updated their VRFCT (VRCFaceTracking) module for ALXR, an open source alternative to Virtual Desktop/Steam Link/Quest Link for PC VR streaming, to support tongue tracking in VRChat, and posted a video to X showing it in action.
Steam Link and Virtual Desktop support Quest Pro’s previous face tracking and can pass it through to VRChat, but both apps will need to be updated to support the v60 SDK to include the tongue.
Don’t expect to see other people’s tongues out in many standalone apps though. Quest Pro’s face tracking has seen barely any third-party adoption on the Quest Store. Meta’s Horizon suite fully supports it, but VRChat’s standalone app only supports eye tracking, while Rec Room and Bigscreen still don’t support either face or eye tracking.
That’s likely because Quest Pro reportedly saw very poor sales, following mixed at best reviews. Meta had to cut its price from $1500 to $1000 just four months after launch and has been giving it away free in recent months. Quest Pro is clearly continuing to get software support though, recently getting a mixed reality performance boost and now this new tracking capability.
