The latest Pico Motion Tracker Waist Version provides standalone body tracking functionality, compatible with both the mobile and PC platforms of VRChat.
Launched alongside the Pico 4 Ultra last year, Pico Motion Trackers are also compatible with older models like the Pico 4 and Pico Neo 3 headsets.
Previously, customers could purchase Pico Motion Trackers in pairs for €90/£80, featuring a shorter strap designed to be secured to the ankles for leg tracking in supported games such as VRChat.
Now, ByteDance has introduced the Pico Motion Tracker Waist Version, priced at €50/£40. This single tracker comes with a longer strap intended for waist attachment.
To fully utilize body tracking, users will need to already possess the ankle trackers, totaling an investment of €140/£120 for complete body tracking functionalities on your Pico headset. Currently, there are no package deals available, requiring separate purchases of both the waist and ankle trackers.
ByteDance asserts that adding the waist tracker substantially enhances body tracking accuracy over solely using ankle trackers, delivering true waist orientation.
This advancement not only boosts social interactivity in applications like VRChat but may also enable torso-relative thumbstick navigation—an option preferred over head-relative or controller-relative movement, contingent on adequate body tracking.
Pico Motion Trackers are being utilized in VRChat, Blade & Sorcery: Nomad, Les Mills Dance, Racket Club, and PC VR, through the integrated Pico Connect feature or the third-party app Virtual Desktop, which requires payment.
Similar to Sony’s Mocopi, each Pico Motion Tracker comprises an inertial measurement unit (IMU), incorporating a compact accelerometer and gyroscope. However, unique to Pico Motion Trackers, each tracker is equipped with 12 infrared LEDs that are detected by the headset for two distinct functions.
The first function involves quick initial calibration. Users simply need to stand still and gaze downward for a base position measurement of their legs and torso. After this, the LEDs assist in providing genuine 6DoF positional tracking as long as a tracker remains in sight of the headset’s tracking cameras.
When out of the camera’s visual range, the IMU data is utilized within a skeletal framework to create credible (though not perfect) estimates of body positions, leading to superior output quality compared to traditional IMU trackers, all at a markedly lower price than Vive Trackers.
ByteDance boasts an “average position error of 5 cm, an average angle error as low as 6°, and an accuracy not falling below 98% for assessing and restoring stepping actions,” with a latency under 20 milliseconds.
Weighing merely 27 grams, each tracker provides an estimated 25 hours of active usage, with recharging via standard USB-C.
VR enthusiasts who own Quest headsets have long been in search of a similar product from Meta, yet in September, Meta’s CTO dismissed the idea, expressing doubts that “the juice is worth the squeeze.”
While the Quest 3 and Quest 3S offer developers an alternate body tracking mechanism, utilizing downward-facing cameras to observe wrists, elbows, shoulders, and torso through sophisticated computer vision algorithms and AI models to generate estimated leg positions, it does not achieve true body tracking. The resulting performance overhead has resulted in negligible adoption by developers, even by Meta for its own Meta Avatars.
Pico’s technology introduces virtually no performance impact, operates in any lighting conditions, and tracks leg movements. Now, with the addition of the waist tracker, it can also monitor torso motion.