From what I've read in the reviews coming out of E3. the finger tracking is nothing more than a touch sensitive pad on a button. When a particular pad cannot detect touch, the in-game finger associated with that particular pad is displayed.
This explains how a thumbs up is done, even though the thumb is not inside the Touch sensor ring. You lift your thumb off the stick, the lack of touch is detected, and the in-game thumb goes up.
Not a Rift fanboi. Not a Vive fanboi. I'm a VR fanboi. Get it straight.
Seriously I feel the Oculus Touch is a very forward-thinking way of approaching hands in VR. In order to do finger tracking you'd need gloves, and quite honestly I think I much prefer a controller over gloves because you have access to buttons and analog controls as well.
Gloves + analog controls is just too much. The Touch might be a little "snappy" with touch sensors only but I think it's a fair compromise.
Vive's wand on the other hand seems like a very backwards way of approaching hands in VR. Like "let's just make clubs that people grab..." so caveman.
As someone with Hydras who used to hang around in Riftmax during the karaoke nights, "snappy" hand gestures are definitely good enough. Even if it's not accurate finger tracking like the Leap motion, it still adds a lot to the experience.
edit:
I wonder if we'll have to measure our fingers now in order to get the in-game hand model to match our real ones.
In the tested video when he was talking to Jack? they made it sound like touch sensors are in the pointer finger trigger and the thumb sticks.
...But in the Oculus "press release" Palmer SPECIFICALLY said you could flip people off. So either they have a touch sensor in the middle finger paddles, or some other sort of sensor... Either way its confusing as hell.
And to the point of "training yourself to keep fingers on the buttons", well right next to the thumb sticks are A,B,X,Y buttons..so every time you go to push one of those with your thumb are you gunna do a thumbs up?
Well, it's a work in progress. Palmer said it was "not necessarily" binary, so there might be distance sensors in there or some other techniques in the works. As for giving the middle finger, surely devs have control over whether or not that's allowed. I'm guessing something facebook makes will attempt to prevent anything negative like that, even "thumbs down!"
I think the sensors would be something like a very basic single leap motion sensor. It will probably detect objects at some sort of distance but the data it gets back would be confusing to look at since everyone has different sized hands. So having trigger on and off is currently less problematic.
