The Quest Pro now supports tongue tracking. That’s all folks!

Sure, we talk a lot about the Quest 3, but that’s because it’s one of the best VR headsets around. It offers a really solid feature set, including some impressive MR capabilities and it’s getting updated with new stuff pretty regularly too. Nice!

And now for something completely different: the Quest Pro. Look, I don’t hate the thing. In fact, I can’t deny that it’s a pretty impressive piece of technology. But my issue with it is that its price sets up quite the high expectations, which the headset simply fails to meet.

But that doesn’t mean that Meta isn’t still supporting it. I mean, a lot of people out there love the Quest Pro and you know what I think about that? Power to them! And I hope that the same crowd of people get excited about the Quest Pro’s latest software upgrade.

Tongue tracking. Because why not, I guess?



I’m sorry — no, actually I’m not — but who is this for? Honestly. I understand that it’s impressive that facial tracking can become this detailed, but did we honestly need tongue tracking more than we needed, say, UI navigation via eye tracking?

Anyway…

Well, version 60 of the SDK for the Quest Pro’s native code and Unity support has dropped, and… Yeah, it allows developers to implement tongue tracking in their apps. As you may have guessed, this is primarily geared towards social hubs like VRChat or Horizon Worlds.

After the feature has been implemented, the Quest Pro — specifically, as this one isn’t available on the Quest 2 or Quest 3 — will be able to tell:

• If your tongue is out
• How far it is sticking out

The future is now, people.

The odd part is that Meta’s own Avatars SDK hasn’t been updated to support this yet, but hey: third party devs can implement this exciting new feature right away, if they want to. And if you’re among the willing ones, please do let me know why in the comments.

So, here’s an important bit: PC VR streaming apps need to support a headset’s capabilities in order to convey them to PC apps and games, and this includes detailed face tracking. Steam Link and Virtual Desktop have been pretty generous with supporting the Quest Pro’s outstanding face tracking capabilities, so we could get support for tongue tracking in the future too.

So, TL;DR: if you’re eager to check out the Quest Pro’s tongue tracking in a PC app, you may need to wait out two updates: one for the app and one for your streaming solution of choice.

But let’s ask the big one: have the Quest Pro’s detailed face tracking capabilities been a hit with the VR community, though? In all honesty, not really. Meta’s own Horizon Worlds social hub supports them — duh — but not many third-party experiences offer the feature beyond that.

And that makes sense. After all, why bother including support for something that only a limited selection of users can take advantage of (let alone would appreciate). Still, if you’re among that group of people: I hope you have fun with tongue tracking.