VIVE's Full Body Tracking: A Leap Forward for VR Community

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution suggests that humans evolved from primates. The drastic climate change in prehistoric times transformed the continent of Africa from a lush jungle into a grassland, resulting in the monkeys, who originally only lived in the trees, to climb down and evolve into walking animals like gorillas, using their strong tree-climbing arms to support maneuvering on the ground. Some of our primate ancestors, however, chose to stand on two legs, freeing their hands and setting the stage for our evolution into tool-using beings – adept at swiping on smartphones. But in the realms of the metaverse and virtual worlds, human evolution tells a different tale.

In March of this year, HTC unveiled the "VIVE Ultimate Tracker" at the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2023). It was passionately welcomed by many VRChat enthusiasts. Now, after eight long months of waiting, the highly anticipated inside-out full-body tracking device is finally available for purchase!

The VIVE Ultimate Tracker weighs 94 grams, has a battery life of 7 hours, Wi-Fi connectivity with an operating
distance of up to 10 meters, and features 6DoF inside-out tracking (Source: HTC VIVE)

What's so special about the VIVE Ultimate Tracker?

You might wonder, what's the big deal with this tracker? VRChat users surely know that if you want full-body tracking, the ideal solution is the original VIVE Tracker, which achieves full-body tracking through the use of base station tracking technology. While the Quest 2's pricing strategy has popularized standalone headsets using inside-out tracking, attracting many new users and advancing VR's mainstream appeal, this convenience comes with a trade-off.

As seen in many news and videos, avatars in virtual worlds typically do not have lower bodies! They appear as ghost-like figures just floating and teleporting around. This is not enough for VR players! They want to be able to dance in VRChat, play dance rhythm games like Dance Dash, and even wear and show off their stylish sneakers to their virtual friends. Consequently, more and more people became dissatisfied with the lack of legs in virtual reality.


I don’t know if Zuckerberg has recovered from his foot injury a while ago, but it’s better not to jump around. (Source: Meta)

Therefore, full-body tracking is highly sought after-- it is the holy grail for everyone who enjoys socializing and gaming in VR. The entire community is eagerly anticipating the technology to be ready.

In the most reductive and obvious terms, the killer feature of our VIVE Ultimate Tracker is that... it can track itself. Based on our inside-out positional tracking technology, each VIVE Ultimate Tracker can obtain its own absolute positional data in physical space, without relying on any other external sensors or headsets.

There are other options on the market, of course, such as Sony's Mocopi. However, the unique advantage of the VIVE Ultimate Tracker is that, in addition to doing exactly what Mocopi can do and process relative positional data using its IMU sensors, the VIVE Ultimate Tracker also incorporates two wide-angle FOV cameras, which are used to calculate absolute position through computer vision. The increase in accuracy and fidelity is beyond what other basic trackers on the market can achieve today. In a sense, you can think of each VIVE Ultimate Tracker as a lightweight headset weighing less than 100 grams that can "see" the environment through its cameras.

This expands the possibilities and applications of the VIVE Ultimate Tracker.

Here I would like to recommend "Eternal Notre Dame" exhibition which is currently being held in Kaohsiung.

For example, the "space-sharing technology" extensively used by HTC VIVE in arcades and other location-based entertainment venues. Through the map-sharing feature of our standalone headsets, large-scale multiplayer VR experiences like "Horizon of Khufu" in Shanghai, "Eternal Notre Dame" in Kaohsiung that transports you to Paris, and the "Squid Game" VR experience in collaboration with Netflix, are a reality. Now, with the assistance of the VIVE Ultimate Tracker, multiplayer VR experiences are expected to become more diverse and creatively interactive, transforming the currently more static guided visual tour experiences into a more vibrant and interactive journeys.

Currently, the VIVE Ultimate Tracker is only compatible with HTC's VIVE Focus 3 and VIVE XR Elite headsets. However, in line with the vision of "openness" and "interoperability" of VIVERSE, the VIVE Ultimate Tracker supports the OpenXR protocol. HTC's Head of Product, Shen Ye, also revealed, "If you would like to do PCVR using the VIVE Ultimate Tracker with a headset other than the VIVE XR Elite, we will be supplying a beta app in the coming weeks. We'll mention more on this later." Quest and Pico users, are you also excited about this?

Let there be legs, and the people in VR have legs. And VIVE saw that the legs were good.