Resolved Oculus Quest + Link: Disable / Override Menu or Home button?

So far haven't found any working solutions..

the problems are:
(1) Random user will most certainly click those buttons by accident,
and it wouldn't be nice to completely remove or block them in every app,
just need that override for a single desktop app only. (uses steamvr)
(2) Would like to use that right hand Oculus Home as a regular usable menu button, like vive controller has.
(3) If you click Oculus home multiple times, it completely jumps out of oculus link, back to quest home

Has anyone seen some relevant topics or workarounds?
- I've enabled dash long press, at least stops the oculus home appearing instantly..


image:
Rift s/Quest controller Menu button is only in the left hand, and it opens some builtin menu view..

 

I have a simmilar problem, but with handtracking. I dont want users to get back to the oculus home by pinching thumb and index finger (this is the default behaviour)
I am using this gesture for another purpose and at the moment you cant really use it because you always get to the oculus home.

Is there a way to disable the default behaviour of this gesture in unity?

 

didn't find any solutions so far either.

For the button at least there is setting that you need to do long press for it, so that removes accidental short clicks:
VR: Settings > Dash > Long Press

even saw people selling some kind of button covers for home/system buttons.. but no real solutions to override.

 

Thanks for the fast reply!
If I find a solution to the problem I will post it here

 

In general this is a very bad idea. It doesn't matter what you would like e.g. the pinch gesture to do: it has been built to ALWAYS DO ONE THING AND ONE THING ONLY, and that's a promise that the hardware makes to its owner. Every owner, every player, knows this. Maybe if they've just bought a Quest then they don't know it yet - but they are trained all day every day in this promise when they use it with other apps. When you break that promise you are (in the player's mind) breaking their actual hardware. This is not something you ever want to do, or be known for!

As a Quest owner, if you did this in your app and were successful, I would likely go find your app (on Steam, wherever) and immediately give it a 1 star "do not buy" rating. It would massively annoy me to suddenly be "stuck" inside your app, held captive, because you decided to mess-up my hardware. Especially when I'm doing demos, or letting newbies play on it - I need to be able to quickly get to Oculus Home etc, and to have that taken away would be a stupid and annoying piece of stress that I don't want.

From the user perspective: you are breaking the core contract I have with *my* device about what works and why. That is not within your authority to do.

...the only time it becomes acceptable is if/when Oculus officially makes it optional and starts encouraging app authors to disable it. Once ALL apps are disabling it, then you're fine. But that seems very unlikely to happen.

 

good point, but i'm not working on publicly releases games/apps,
so its kind of critical that those menus could be overridden with custom menus..
(so that user doesn't accidentally exit the app, which they don't need to do)

while there is apparently some kiosk mode options, that doesnt allow custom menu button either it seems.

 

As was pointed out, this is a no-go intentionally. The "Oculus" button should always allow the user to exit the application and return to their 'home' screen. Imagine you're using your phone and you run an application on it and you find that now the button that takes you back to your home screen on your phone no longer works because the developer decided to change the functionality of it. In fact, the only way you can now get out of this application is by however the developer decided to do it. Imagine they also disabled the screenlock/power button -- you must use however the developer of the application decided to allow you to do those things.

If you find yourself in a situation in VR development where you think you should remove access to such things, I suggest reexamining what it is you're trying to do. Just like you should never remove agency from the user in VR (controlling the camera for them, for instance), you should never try to override buttons like the Oculus button.

If you're doing research in VR and are attempting to test how losing access to such things would affect the user, I would suggest contacting Oculus directly or get an engineer to disable it physically on the controller.

The "sandwich" button on the left controller is intended for developers to use for menu's but can technically be used for anything.

 

"If you find yourself in a situation in VR development where you think you should remove access to such things, I suggest reexamining what it is you're trying to do." - there are plenty of applications where it's *better* UX to disable the Home button; I do a lot of events work where the user has almost 100% never used VR and is guided through the experience by a member of staff, and having them be accidentally dumped into the home screen (which could be mistaken for part of the experience) is a big problem for me.

In a commercial setting, sure, it's a terrible idea (it's worth noting here that Android _does_ allow you to override the home button) but the solution to that is to write a one line automated check on store submissions to reject any apps that use the API.

I notice that Oculus has an "enterprise edition" that's twice the price (and requires a yearly subscription) but has a kiosk mode. Bit cynical if you ask me, but that's Facebook for ya.

 

Have you found the solution? I'm facing the same problem here with the handtracking menu.

 

I believe disabling the Oculus button is against the Oculus EULA, you can't do it and publish the app. It's also very rude to the user (outside kiosk type Apps, which really are an outlier).

 

This thread is not resolved. So, why have tagged with "resolved"?

I don't have my Oculus right now, but seems that in the script OVRPlugin, if you search Pinch, there are a lot of metodth about it. I'm sure you can change some values to enable/disable the hand tracking menu pinch.

Edit: Didn't found any solution. This pinch is for the interactables. I'm gonna try change the menu images for make them be invisible at least.

 

hmm yeah, i didn't mark that. (and didnt find any solutions that time)

and really moving away from Quest every time that its possible.
(because of the forced fb logins, all the tracking and analytics.. customers cannot have their products, environment or audio recorded etc.)

 

I'm building a VR experience on quest 2 for a public art project. that quest will be for "public" use so turning it off for hand tracking the home button would be extremely helpful.. the button can still work on a controller even, the curators will have them. So is there a way or a hack to just make it ineffective on hand tracking?

 

Same as Sighter - I'm making a demo to show at a game dev expo and I want it disabled so people either can't accidentally jump out of it, or intentionally do it and play other games.

 

Still no solution for supress Home and Menu gesture?

 

I'm in a similar boat and find this very frustrating. Haven't found a workaround so far.

 

In the latest Quest update the pinch time has been reduced to .5 seconds for left pinch (open menu/exit app), which is really short.

I see others here are saying to reconsider your game design if gestures are breaking immersion, and is good philosophy when gestures work reliably, but the gestures just became such a hinderance and are now causing me to keep exiting my apps without realizing, I think Facebook is getting a little carried away and it's very distasteful IMO. Not one setting to disable or personalization the behavior. How absolutely incredibly inconsiderate. I now think of the Quest as just a constant immersion breaking experience.

Gestures do have a place, but not for every app nor should they be forced on every user all the time.

 

Exactly the same issue for me, it's merely for an art project with a fixed setting that should have as little possible (accidental) errors as possible. If visitors accidentally open up the menu and no one nearby knows how to re-open the game, it's gonna be a pain... I fear visitors won't be able to experience the project at all if that happens. My project is going to run with oculus link, so it's easy to close the app and go to other menus etc if truly necessary.
I'm trying out hand tracking so that visitors can't accidentally drop controllers or have to deal with empty batteries. It would be perfect if they can just interact with their own hands (it is more immersive as well!). I thought there could be a way for the current pinch interactions (menus) to change to moving forward and turn. I know it can be done, another VR art exhibition I went to had a similar setup with hand tracking.

So instead of closing this thread as "resolved" without actually reading into what people mean is the real no-go here, in my opinion. We won't upload these kind of project into the app store... We just want help with possible solutions!

 

Another vote to be able to opt out of this, even in a development context. Really easy to have users leave a controlled hardware environment, and not even the ability to physically disable

 

Has Oculus fixed the buggy gesture behavior yet or is it still part of the Quest?

I have not updated my Quest to prevent further breaking it from bad updates, but I would update it in a nanosecond if Oculus added options to disable pinch gestures in-game.

Is the buggy gesture menus still being forced 100% on all production Quest 2? Will Quest3 be affected also??

 

Same Problem here,

We are developing a visual experience for an exhibition and one after another visitor will be able to experience it. For this kind of application its definitely essential that none of the users will open the menu and close tha app.

 

Can confirm Meta Quest Pro is just as buggy with pinch gestures causing users to exit the app unintentionally, actually the Quest Pro has "faster" hand tracking which I think makes the bug even easier to invoke.

 

Has anyone went with using only hand-tracking?

does user easily exit that mode? (havent even used it really.. so not sure what gesture is exit)

 

say you're creating a symphony orchestra simulator where the player is the conductor. If you use the optical hand tracking to track the player's hands the Oculus pinch gesture recognizer is constantly running in the background looking for pinch events, and is extremely fast to react to them and the menus are sticky, so the user being a orchestra conductor waiving their hands around in a pinched pose is Constantly causing false positives to occur and the sticky menu guarantees a button will get clicked so this often leads to the user (or customer) to unintentionally exit the app and breaks immersion.

Not to mention the circle buttons that always appear when the user makes a pinch with no way to disable so is also immersion breaking,

It would be great if Oculus provided the user the option to disable pinch gestures while "in-game". Or gave the developer a option to override the pinch menus if there is good reason to do so.

The Quest Pro is really cool though..

 

I'm making a kiosk mode experience that is using hand-tracking, and in order to avoid users accidentally triggering the system gesture pop-up I've resorted to slapping a Leap Motion 2 onto the headset. Before ending with such a clucky solution, I tried using difference managers like ArborXR and ManageXR. They promise they can prevent users from exiting an app - and they can, but as I found out that does not mean they can disable the system gesture menu, they just block the home button.

I understand why Meta and Pico enforces consistency in their system gestures - to make sure users are never trapped in an app. But for kiosk experiences it is another story. In that case I don't care if I'm putting on a Quest, a Pico, a Varjo or any other hand-tracking enabled device. I would expect the experience to run one app and nothing more. Hopefully Meta, Pico, and the rest will understand this need at some point.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the Leap 2 hand tracking seriously suck compared to Quest 2. It looks like it just takes the raw model inference output, without applying any kind of constraints, and the result is that fingers are all over the place and changes length as you move your hands. Leap told me they are "working on improving the hand tracking experience". I sure hope so.

No, this thread is not "resolved".

 

Hey folks, I've been digging around for hours trying to find a solution to this issue, especially when it comes to hand-gestures, and I've come up empty. It seems like it might be more of a headset thing than a software or game issue. Obviously, it'd be awesome to have control over this feature for experiments and experiences outside of the Meta Market. If anyone finds a solution, please share the love!

 

Also having the same issue.
We have the Quest running an app for an exhibition and having user able to quit the app is problematic, on top of the fact that those menus really break the immersion.

 

hey +1 on this
on the UX, I see both sides of the argument here

putting your thumb and index finger together, is probably one of the top 3 hand gestures that we humans do, for grabbing things and writing with a pen etc. If we use an analogy, its like mapping the 's' key on a keyboard to the behaviour of the windows key, it becomes impossible to use the full normal range of keyboard.

Meta, if you are reading this, it would be better if you change the 'meta menu' hands gesture to something easily remembered, but quite obscure. That way we can use this fundamental human behaviour without triggering an exit from our apps. whatever gesture IS chosen for this global, system wide event will stop it being used in apps.

maybe something like a double tap on the side of the device, like we have for switching to MR / VR is the answer? to keep the full range of gestures open for app designers?

 

+1 - exactly the same situation as others mention here, we have an art installation type of project where users unfamiliar with VR are using the devices, and tend to wreak havoc if they escape into the main menu and start redrawing guardian boundaries, launching other apps, activating passthrough, screen recordings, recentering, etc...

At the moment we're using the controllers because the button can simply be covered up, but they lead to their own issues with user onboarding, keeping track of the controllers, keeping them charged, people snapping off the thumbsticks, etc.

I fully understand the argument that for apps distributed on the store, users need a consistent means of exiting the application. However, for this kind of kiosk situation, we really need to be able to lock the headset into one app, and losing the immersion breaking pinch menus would be great for us too.

A different, less common gesture, like suggested above, or the ability to disable the pinch menu altogether for apps which will not be publicly distributed, would be a game-changer for us. Otherwise, we're just going to have to strap Leap Motion 2s to headsets with perfectly good tracking capabilities of their own.

 

I really hope that someone at Meta will give us more info about this feature... I've opened a thread on their forum, please write your comments there so that we have a chance to get some answers from meta.

https://communityforums.atmeta.com/...-way-to-disable-system-menu/m-p/1167140#M9431