ByteDance announced the lineup of standalone apps and games that will support leg tracking via Pico Motion Trackers.
The company also confirmed that a pack of two trackers with leg straps will retail for £80 in the UK and €90 in Europe.
What Are Pico Motion Trackers?
Pico Motion Trackers are an accessory you wear to add leg tracking to Pico 4 Ultra, Pico 4, and Pico Neo 3.
Like Sony's Mocopi, each Pico Motion Tracker features an inertial measurement unit (IMU) containing a tiny accelerometer and gyroscope. But unlike other IMU trackers, Pico Motion Trackers also feature 12 infrared LEDs each, which are tracked by the headset for two purposes.
The first is rapid initial calibration. You simply stand still and look down, and the base position of your legs is measured. From then on, they're used to provide true 6DoF positional tracking whenever a tracker is within view of one of the headset's tracking cameras.
When they're not in view of a camera, the IMU data is fed into a skeletal model to produce plausible (but imperfect) estimated leg poses. This hybrid model is an interesting approach we haven't seen used for leg tracking before. It should provide a higher quality output than pure IMU trackers at a significantly lower cost than Vive Trackers.
ByteDance claims an "average position error of 5 cm, an average angle error of as low as 6°, and an accuracy of not less than 98% for stepping action judgment and restoration" with a latency of less than 20 milliseconds.
Each tracker weighs just 27 grams, offers a claimed 25 hours of active use, and is charged via standard USB-C.
ByteDance says the following Pico Store standalone titles will support Pico Motion Trackers at launch:
- VRChat
- Les Mills Dance
- Racket Club
- Tempo Club
- Foot Pool
- Let’s Get Fit VR
- All in One Sports
The company says more than 13 other apps have committed to adding support in the future, including the physics-based RPG Blade & Sorcery: Nomad and Drunkn Bar Fight.
Pico Motion Trackers can also be used in any PC VR apps which support Vive Trackers, such as the PC version of VRChat, via the company's Pico Connect PC VR streaming app.
While the £80/€90 retail package includes two trackers and leg straps, Pico also supports pairing a third tracker for torso tracking, and tells UploadVR it's exploring the idea of selling a single tracker with a torso strap or even a three-pack bundle with leg and torso tracking.
David Heaney
