Rec Room Working on SteamVR Body Tracking Support
Rec Room is adding body tracking support on SteamVR along with hand tracking on Quest.
Rec Room has the now infamous legless avatars. The addition of body tracking support for SteamVR will enable users to strap three or more Vive Trackers. The body tracking support will arrive at the same time as or soon after the launch of full-body avatars later in 2023.
The full-body avatar option will be available even if you don’t have body-tracking equipment and Rec Room says it will be an optional feature.
Rec Room has provided a description of how the system will work for users without body tracking as well as the transition between standing and thumbstick movement for users with body tracking.
The Rec Room description states that the positions of the legs and feet are not known in virtual reality and they have to rely on an artist’s interpretation. The positions of the hands and the head are known and they, thus, try to pose the avatars to align with the real VR pose.
Rec Room says if a user has full-body tracking, they can figure out the positions of the legs and the feet, enabling them to dynamically switch between avatar animations and the virtual reality tracking information in posing the lower body according to the situation.
As a user runs around, Rec Room continuously plays the animations on their legs even though the user’s real legs aren’t actually moving. The animations on the legs make the player appear to other users in Rec Room like they are actually running. Rec Room says that when the player stops walking in-game, it will blend back to indicate the real leg positions so they can pose or dance however they like.
VRChat already offers body tracking support on SteamVR. However, the avatars in Meta’s Horizon and Bigscreen are still legless. Meta is also planning to add legs to its avatars later in the year. Unlike Rec Room’s leg positions that are generated by body tracking hardware, Meta’s avatar legs will be estimated by machine learning.
Rec Room’s controller-free hand-tracking will hit the market much later than body-tracking functionalities. That implies it will likely ship later in the year.
Meta first released its hand-tracking technology for the original Quest headset in late 2019. However, the feature is only being supported on social VR platforms at this time.
VRChat support came late last year. Bigscreen is also planning to add hand-tracking support later in the year. There is hand-tracking support on both Horizon Home and Horizon Workrooms even though the functionality is not supported on Horizon Worlds.
Rec Room shared an image of the concept art of its new avatar hands that are powered by hand tracking. You can check it below.
