body tracking

Pimax Lighthouse Faceplate Delivers Sub-Millimeter Body-Tracking

August 10, 2023 From vrscout

The Lighthouse Faceplate starts at $199. That said, Pimax is offering bundled discounts with other devices.

Pimax has just announced the release of the Lighthouse Faceplate, a new tracking extension accessory for its Crystal VR headset that promises to deliver a better VR experience via enhanced peripheral expansion, high-precision tracking, and numerous other features that will blow you away.

The Lighthouse Faceplate is designed specifically for the Pimax Crystal VR headset. Once attached, it will enable the headset to be compatible with Steam’s Lighthouse external base station system, tracking your movements with sub-millimeter accuracy.

You will also have the ability to customize the tracking options on the Lighthouse Faceplate. This provides you with greater freedom of movement with full-body tracking and allows for a much deeper physical engagement that can be used for scene expansion and professional applications, such as using VR for enterprise training.

No need for the replacement of your current controllers since the Lighthouse Faceplate is compatible with existing SteamVR base stations and controllers.

Here’s a list of tracking devices compatible with the Lighthouse Faceplate:

Pimax Sword Controller
Index Knuckles Controller
Vive Controller
Vive Tracker 1.0 / 2.0 / 3.0
Tundra Tracker

Credit: Pimax

A few things to mention before you make your decision: the Lighthouse system doesn’t support multiple sets of base station systems to work in one space. You’ll also want to avoid placing reflective objects like mirrors in your space in order to prevent inaccurate positioning due to reflections. Finally, a single faceplate system supports up to 16 object tracking.

Here are the SteamVR base station specifications:

SteamVR Base Station 1.0

Maximum supported base stations: 2
Tracking Range: 3.5m x 3.5m (with two base stations)
Maximum supported tracking devices: 16

SteamVR Base Station 2.0

Maximum supported base stations: 4
Tracking Range: 5m x 5m (with two base stations), 10m x 10m (with four base stations)
Maximum supported tracking devices: 16

The launch of the Lighthouse Faceplate promises to give you a much more precise and awe-inspiring VR gaming experience with amazing tracking, and at a standalone price of $199, the Lighthouse Faceplate is a nice deal. Pimax is also offering some killer bundled discounts.

Bundled offers include the following discounts:

Bundle 1: Crystal ($1,599) + Lighthouse Faceplate ($199)

Bundle price after $100 discount: $1,698
Limited to 500 sets for four weeks.

Bundle 2: Crystal ($1,599) + Lighthouse Faceplate ($199) + Base Stations ($239) * 2 + Sword Controllers ($300)

Bundle price after $279 discount: $2,297
Limited to 100 sets for four weeks.

One thing to note is that the above prices are provided for reference; the final price is subject to actual purchase.

The Pimax Lighthouse Faceplate is for those who take their VR experiences very seriously and require high-precision tracking. The release date for the Pimax Lighthouse Faceplate is expected to be mid-August.

To learn more about Pimax, the Lighthouse Faceplate, or to enter a contest to win a free Crystal VR headset, visit here.

Feature Image Credit: Pimax

Sony’s Mocap Device Lets ‘VRChat’ Users Unleash Their Inner Anime Girl

July 1, 2023 From roadtovr

There are a few body tracking solutions on the market to help you on your quest to finally transform into a dancing anime girl, and Sony is now releasing its own previously Japan-only device in the US.

Mocopi, which gets its name from motion capture (mocap), was initially announced in late 2022, becoming available exclusively in Japan in early 2023. While a ton of vTubers worldwide already jumped the gun and ordered direct from Japan, now Sony is making it officially available in the US, priced at $450.

Mocopi comes with six small and lightweight inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensors that hook into a dedicated smartphone app (iOS and Android), letting you do full-body motion tracking both in and outside of VR.

And while Mocopi seems to be squarely targeting those would-be vTubers, another use case the company is trumpeting is undoubtably the device’s ability to give avatars better full-body tracking for things like VRChat. Yes, there’s a built-in VRChat integration, which means you can grab your Quest 2 or PC VR headset, hook up Mocopi to your extremities, and get dancing for all to see.

Like many such IMU-based tracking devices, positional drift is a real concern, although it seems Sony is pitching this more as a way to casually jump into body tracking and not get that 100 percent accuracy you’ll need when doing the [fill in a popular dance] on TikTok.

Coming from Sony, you’d think there would be some sort of integration with PSVR 2, although that doesn’t seem to be a possibility. The company hasn’t mentioned any such integration since it initially launched in Japan in January.

Mocopi is already available for purchase, available exclusively from Sony for $450. Sony says Mocopi orders will ship to customers starting July 14th, 2023. Check out the Sony’s quick start guide below to get see just what you’re signing up for.

Meta’s Next-gen Avatar Presentation Was Too Good to Be True… For Now at Least

October 14, 2022 From roadtovr

This week Meta showed off a preview of its next-gen avatars during the Connect keynote. Frankly, they looked great! However, there’s… less than meets the eye here.

When Mark Zuckerberg appeared in Horizon during the Connect 2022 keynote sporting a next-gen Meta avatar with complete body tracking I was frankly blown away. Compared to the existing leg-less avatars that everyone appears as in Horizon, these new models not only had a full body, but also incredibly natural and movements with not a glitch in sight… it seemed almost too good to be true.

From what I know of the existing tech and limitations for tracking the body from a headset… what was shown here would have amounted to breakthrough work from Meta. Here was Zuckerberg literally jumping around and touching his feet with seemingly perfect tracking. His on-stage guest also highlighted what appeared to be perfectly accurate elbow tracking, something that’s only roughly estimated with today’s avatars. Zuckerberg then proceeded to say that these avatars would be launching sometime next year.

But all is not what it seems. After reaching out to Meta to clarify what tech was used to create that segment, a spokesperson told me the team used common external motion capture tech to drive the movement of the avatars, rather than its own solution running real-time on one of its headsets.

From my conversation with Meta, the company explained the segment was intended to show off how the next-gen Meta avatars look (from a model and texture standpoint) but how they moved was, “presented for illustrative, forward-looking purposes,” the company said.

So I have serious doubts that the first full-body VR avatars from Meta will have this level of high quality body tracking—and I’d argue the company was a little deceptive here.

What we’re probably going to see in the first iteration of Meta avatars with legs is an AI inference of leg positions that will look plausible from a third-person view… but nothing like being able to jump around and touch your feet—in fact, from a first-person view you probably won’t be shown your virtual legs.

But there’s no doubt that Meta’s avatars have been getting consistently better and that the company has been doing tons of R&D to try to reach the vision Zuckerberg presented.

Meta is burning the candle on both ends here. For one it’s steadily upgrading the avatars that actually exist today—like new face-tracking that will come thanks to Quest Pro—to make them more expressive and human. And on the other end, the company is working to try to make the most photorealistic avatars it can with its Codec Avatar project, which it hopes will one day be usable even on low-powered headsets.

So I won’t say that Meta will never have avatars that show the kind of full-body tracking quality that was shown off at Connect 2022. In fact there’s an interesting possibility that VR controllers with on-board cameras (like Touch Pro) might be able to solve this problem one day, but it seems certain this won’t be the case for the first version of Meta’s legged avatars.