Tracking your body in VR

A new passion!

VR is a new passion of mine, that I play with in my freetime, but also explore as a developer and tech enthusiast.

As video quality has evolved a lot in the past 2 years, the big topic now is full body immersion.

What needs to be tracked in VR?

The following things are becoming more important:

• Hand-Tracking: hand & fingers, touch, grab & place …
• Eye-Tracking: left & right eye, focus …
• Lip-Tracking: speech, facial expressions
• Body-Tracking: arms, legs, hips …
• Free Locomotion without boundaries
• Smell & Taste-Tracking
• Brain & Neural Tracking

I will use this article to collect things that are already available, diy projects, experiments and things that are in their early stages.

Hand Tracking

Hand & finger tracking is already making its way into consumer products. It is still not widely integrated, but has made big jumps the past year.

Eye Tracking

Eye tracking is not only important to make avatars more life-like, but also to track your eye focus and help to reduce processor load.

Lip Tracking

Lip tracking has made a big jump, with the new Vive Lip tracker and is important for social interactions.

Body Tracking / Tracking parts of the body

Body tracking is one of the areas, that has so many projects attached to it. There are so many neat solutions out there, that almost anyone can use it by now.

• KinectToVR – Full-Body Tracking with your Kinect for Xbox 360, Kinect for Xbox One or PlayStation Move + Eye
• SlimeVR – Open Source Full Body Tracking. Crowd Supply / Youtube
• DecaMove – Hip tracking. They also offer an Android App, to do the same.

Free Locomotion Tracking

Free locomotion is one of the biggest challenges in VR right now. You can increase your playarea, but that is still limiting and requires space. Their are VR treadmills, but none of them really reproduces life-like natural movement yet. And those solutions that come close, are still out of your reach. Most of the tracking above is somehow covered and will be available soon, while real locomotion is really the hardest to solve of them all.

• Natural Locomotion – Natural Locomotion is an application that emulates the controller thumbstick input (to use in any game), to walk, run and jump more naturally moving your arms or your feet. It includes a driver for SteamVR for this purpose.

Tools & Software

• VirtualHere – allows USB devices to be used remotely over a network just as if they were locally connected!

Avatars

Always crucial to have the right look for yourself in VR :)

• Ready Player Me – Avatars

Lets get started ….