Full Body Tracking in Virtual Reality With HTC Vive Trackers

Having tracked hands or controllers in virtual reality is increasingly common thanks to the HTC Vive controllers and Oculus Touch controllers. What you don't see too often, though, is a full body being tracked. With Vizard, our VR development platform, you can use HTC Vive trackers to track just about anything. 

In the quick demo you see below, we had someone attach the trackers to their feet and pelvis so that we could track full body movement using our inverse kinematics system. We're also doing early experimental work to get this working with Vizible, our simple but powerful VR creation and collaboration tool. Take a peek:

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Why might this kind of tracking be handy? Here are just a few possible use cases:

• Avatar motion capture where you want to capture full body movements.
• Collaborative virtual reality where it's important that you can truly see where people are standing relative to the virtual environment.
• Building a scenario or simulation that needs to track where someone's foot or body position is (e.g. maybe your VR experience is trying to teach people how to perform particular stretches, how to position themselves in case of different circumstances, etc).
• Researching or tracking different kinds of movement in VR for body parts other than hands and head.
• Training simulations where the user may have to run through a procedure that involves their full body.

See how it looks from the perspective of the person in VR:

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If you'd like to learn more about how we did this, or you're interested in incorporating full body tracking into your VR project: we're here to help. You can reach out here.