A gesture-based wake process for an AR system is described herein. The AR system places a hand-tracking input pipeline of the AR system in a suspended mode. A camera component of the hand-tracking input pipeline detects a possible visual wake command being made by a user of the AR system. On the basis of detecting the possible visual wake command, the AR system wakes the hand-tracking input pipeline and places the camera component in a fully operational mode. If the AR system, using the hand-tracking input pipeline, verifies the possible visual wake command as an actual wake command, the AR system initiates execution of an AR application.