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Developer Sticks Vive Tracker On Oculus Rift, Enables Foot Tracking

by Jamie Feltham • April 3rd, 2017

HTC’s Vive Trackers are finally rolling out to developers, and, yes, someone’s already stuck one on an Oculus Rift.

That someone is Ivan Mathy of VR developer OKatBest. Last month, we labelled the Rift as one of the things we couldn’t wait to stick the Vive Tracker on and enable SteamVR tracking on Facebook’s headset, but Mathy has beaten us to it. Late yesterday, he showed the Tracker stuck to the front of the headset with a custom rig. The Tracker enabled positional tracking on the Rift inside a SteamVR experience. Without it Rift’s rotation headtracking was still enabled, but the Lighthouse base stations can’t detect its actual location.

You might wonder what the point in this is, and Mathy himself admits it’s an experiment just for the sake of it, but it does has some interesting results. Apparently the developer has to block out the Rift’s infrared lights as they were causing interference. More importantly, however, the developer was then able to attach the Vive controllers to his feet while holding the Oculus Touch controllers in his hands. The result is hand and foot-tracking on Rift but, as we’ve already seen from Cloudgate Studios, that could feasibly go a step forward and enable full-body tracking on the platform too.

It’s not the first headset we’ve seen the Tracker attached to; Master of Shapes also stuck the kit on the front of a Google Daydream device to enable positional tracking within mobile VR. The device sold out pretty quickly when it went on sale last week, though it’s only available as a $99 developer edition right now. The consumer version is expected to go on sale later in the year.

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  • koenshaku

    Pointless

    • William Tatum

      Not at all, I can imagine this adding an immersive element to soccer games. With the current nascent state of VR imagine a simple game of shooting free throws at a goalie. Sure you could do it with a controller but it would be way more immersive if your VR unit could track your feet. Ditto for kicking Field Goals in football.

      It could also enable a game kinda like old school Nintendo Olympics where you run in place doing various track and field games.

      It could even be used to enable a VR variant of the DDR games.

      • koenshaku

        By purchasing a Vive and a Oculus mounting it on your oculus HMD? You need the light houses to track the trackers makes no sense.

        • TheEffectGuy .

          You get the benefit of the better Oculus Touch controllers and you get to wear the wands as shoes. Only one tracker needed

      • Mic Ty

        Sure, but if you already have a Vive, why not just put trackers on your feet?

        • koenshaku

          Don’t get me wrong I will be the first in line to purchase vive trackers for putting them on my feet for full body tracking. This guy puts it on an oculus rift where it can’t track his head then puts some vive controllers on his flap around with a broken experience that nothing works with and for what purpose? None because whatever he is going to develop if it works at all still requires an oculus and an HTC vive. It is a pointless effort that has produced nothing but a guy with a vive tracker on his oculus rift that doesn’t work..

        • William Tatum

          I would imagine because then you wouldn’t have controllers for your hands? I was not supporting this particular implementation, which to be fair is cludgey. But rather the general idea of being able to track feet being useful.

  • NooYawker

    I guess this one of those things to do just to see if you can do it.

  • Ted Joseph

    Cant wait to kick the first one through my computer monitor! Lol.. Seriously, I am excited to have full body tracking.