The challenge

• When Meta introduced controllerless hand tracking to Quest — initially called Direct Touch — it represented a genuinely new way for humans to interact with computers.

• There was no existing vocabulary for it, no familiar mental model to borrow from, and no instructional precedent to adapt. Users picking up a Quest for the first time had to simultaneously learn two new skills: how to navigate the OS with their bare hands, and how to move through and control virtual environments using locomotion controls they'd never encountered.

What I did

• I designed the user education content for both Direct Touch (hand tracking) and locomotion controls — the in-headset instructional flows, UI copy, and interaction prompts that guided new users through their first moments inside a virtual world.

• For hand tracking, the challenge was explaining a paradigm with no analogue. I developed copy that worked with the interaction itself — short, contextual, moment-by-moment instruction that let the experience teach the mechanic rather than front-loading explanation. For locomotion, I wrote the education flows covering movement, turning, teleportation, and object manipulation — the core verbs of VR that, once learned, unlock everything else.

• Both projects required close collaboration with motion design, UXR, and engineering teams to ensure the words landed at exactly the right moment in the interaction — neither too early nor too late.

The result

• Hand tracking adoption activation and adoption rate steadily throughout the first few months upon launch, peaking at around 10% of all active users on month three, paving the way for the seamless mixed reality interactions that Meta had in mind.

• Hand tracking (formerly known as “Direct Touch”) has become one of Quest's signature interaction modes.