Virtual reality has come a long way: put on a headset and you can peer into an alien world or feel like you’re laying on a beach in Jamaica. But interacting with that world—reaching out your hand to pick up a virtual object on the screen—still has a long way to go.

Researchers at Microsoft said Friday they’ve brought that capability a bit closer, with an accurate and flexible hand-tracking system called Handpose that uses a standard Xbox One Kinect without any hardware modifications.

The system uses the depth camera and software developed by the researchers to track movements of your hand and fingers and transfer them to the screen. They’re not the only people to have done this, but they say their system advances the state of the art in several ways.

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