Full Body Dancing in the Vive

[nova]

I have full body tracking with the 3 extra trackers. When it works It works great in VRchat with one exception: when trying to dance the trackers will jiggle when you put your foot down with any effort.

What this means is your awesome dance routine looks glitchy and you lose that sense of fluid motion. This rules out stomping or basically any powerful footwork.

The trackstraps are, upon examination, utter garbage. The screw that screws into the tracker doesn’t even make a secure fit. The threading apparently freely rotates within the strap. What this means is while dancing you run the risk of your feet or waist twisting into a deformed position. Not only that but the tracker can rotate into a lot of tiny angles because nothing is firmly securing it all. Not to mention the strap itself tends to rotate outward, angling the tracker to the left or right. This eventually makes your characters feet look broken.

To remedy all of these issues I tried to use hair bands to get a tighter fit. This worked great for the tracker on my belt but the ones I put on my shoes had mixed success. There still seems to be a high degree of jiggle. Granted feet make contact with the floor unlike your waist.

I tried using the trackstraps on my ankles instead of the foot but this failed to solve the problems. In fact it creates a new one. If you have the tracker on your ankle you lose the motion of your ankle.

So upon observing the problem persists despite all of these attempts I am going to try putting the trackers on a pair of snow boots by way of 3 tight hair bands. My thinking is that the thicker material might dampen the reverberation and that it might prevent some jiggling from the unit.

I love full body tracking and I hope Vive expands the technology. The current trackers are simply not well designed for foot tracking with any degree of intensity. As long as you never make contact with a solid object (like the floor) it looks fine.

Functionally the trackers work fine but from an aesthetic point of view from within a game world they do not look smooth all the time. I do not know if the problem is the tracker itself or that you just need a thick pair of boots and something to bind it tight. The very fact you have to do that sorta shows that we need alternatives to the trackstraps. They have a casual usefulness but they lack precision.

The trackstraps were made to sell some mediocre dance game that I couldn’t even get to work. Hopefully something comes along that better works with dancing avatars in mind.

[chasquit]

Have you seen this video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyCc2186viY I haven't used the Vive Trackers strapped to my feet so to give you a personal opinion but if you ask me I don't think the trackers are the problem. It probably has to do with the trackstraps being used or even maybe how the app handles the data. Let us know when you have some results after trying with the boots, please.

[Fuinelen]

Interesting that they strap the waist tracker to the BACK. I'll have to try that and see how VRChat reacts.

As for the feet, I use garden shoes like this ( https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/512n04HdETL._UX395_.jpg ) in conjunction with 1/4 screws (the kind you can screw the pucks on) and a bit of cardboard on the inside to stop the screw to just pop through the hole in the shoe. Seems to hold well enough for dancing around so far.

[nova]

The shoes I tried were slip on and laceless. Also tried tennis shoes. Tried in socks. I started making a hole to put a bolt through one of them. The problem is the fabric of the slip on shoes would allow a lot of motion. So it’s probably a waste of time to use them.

I even tried using two trackstraps on each foot, one for ankle and one for the sole overlapping. Was afraid I was going to cut off circulation. My theory was that the ankle could stabilize the motion.

I wish there were options to configure the trackers like say for instance to mute all Tracking data under a certain range of motion or kind. Some kind of artificial smoothing.

My guess is that the problem is that the tracker is able to move independently of the shoe. If you can manage to get it to move 1:1 with the shoe I imagine that solves the problem.

Otherwise the issue is with the internal components or the way tracking works. But I don’t think that’s the case.

[nova]

Originally posted by Fuinelen:

Interesting that they strap the waist tracker to the BACK. I'll have to try that and see how VRChat reacts.

As for the feet, I use garden shoes like this ( https://images-eu.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/512n04HdETL._UX395_.jpg ) in conjunction with 1/4 screws (the kind you can screw the pucks on) and a bit of cardboard on the inside to stop the screw to just pop through the hole in the shoe. Seems to hold well enough for dancing around so far.

You can put the waist tracker anywhere on mid section. It sometimes loses tracking but usually works. Best location is behind your arm on the side so you can lay down both ways. Do you get jiggling when you stomp in those shoes?

[Fuinelen]

I just tried them in HighFidelity (which allows up to 6 trackers) and the foot tracking was rock solid. I'll try to record something later and put it up on youtube.

The main advantages of the shoes I bought (apart from the super low price) are that the plastic is very thick, so it doesn't really jiggle on its own when your foot is in, and the holes are already there so no need to modify anything.

For the waist I have a harness that came with my GoPro Clone, so that works fine.

[Code]

Should have used the Xbox connect for full body tracking, the adaptor in on Amazon.

[nova]

Originally posted by Alienmoon:

Should have used the Xbox connect for full body tracking, the adaptor in on Amazon.

Uh... troll post? Also it’s spelled Kinect and I have one. They only work from specific angles. Not useful for 360 degree room scale.

[nova]

Originally posted by Fuinelen:

I just tried them in HighFidelity (which allows up to 6 trackers) and the foot tracking was rock solid. I'll try to record something later and put it up on youtube.

The main advantages of the shoes I bought (apart from the super low price) are that the plastic is very thick, so it doesn't really jiggle on its own when your foot is in, and the holes are already there so no need to modify anything.

For the waist I have a harness that came with my GoPro Clone, so that works fine.

I use a belt I cut to size that I put above my hip bones. I’ll have to try grabbing some new shoes and bolts.

[BOLL]

I use a Peak Design Capture camera clip on my belt for the waist, it's super solid. I have the same problem with the feet though, as Fuinelen I use Crocs (although off-brand) using screws and rubber washers off of a camera rail.

The feet wobble when I put them on the ground, even when being careful. Not sure if it's the impact that rattles the IMU inside the Tracker, or the Tracker itself that jiggles. I'd have to watch back some video to try and see, I suspect a combination.

In my mind I see 3D-scanning the top of my feet and having some kind of mounting block 3D printed, I just lack all the equipment for doing that ;) But, some kind of solid mounting on top of the foot might be worth pursuing...

[Fuinelen]

Boll, sorry ... I just used the first picture that came up. Mine are also simple, no name, unbranded pieces of plastic :)

I tried again today, and there is a very slight wobble when I put my feet on the ground hard. Interestingly HighFidelity does a better job of filtering it (generally speaking, HF's body tracking is much more solid than VRChat's, but sadly nobody is there ... and it's more like the Facebook to VRChat's 4Chan). AS far as I can tell the wobble in my case comes from the fact that the screw is a little bit too long, so If I can fix the puck a bit more tightly it might go away.

[nova]

Using boots and rubber bands seems to help some but there is still a noticeable jiggle or lack of tracking. Also I noticed that some of the motion can be due to a loose waist tracker. I noticed a lot of motion throughout the body and then tightened the belt and diminished it.

I wish there were more official products for full body tracking. I mostly want to figure out what is causing the problem. It might be that the sudden stop shakes the internals and relays an inaccurate message to the base stations. But waving it around doesn’t do it. Or there are tiny tremors that get amplified in VRchat possibly because the avatars are not well suited for stress and the program or the trackers themselves are not able to accurately decode the seemingly contradictory motion of a stomp because of the vibration back and forth.

[chksix]

They need filters to dampen out those fast motions. Otherwise you'll have to mount screws directly to your bones.

[Sticky Honeybuns]

I don't have experience with developing for the Vive trackers but I do develop automated robotics. In fact my automated shipping bot won first place at IEEE con.

This issue is a common issue in sensors, especially highly sensitive sensors/product like the Vive trackers. Personally I believe a simple software patch would fix this by taking the derivative of the xyz transformations in respect to time, dx/dt, dy/dt, dz/dt. Basically this will allow for a smooth path between point a and point b without all the jumping in between the path. dt can be changed to whatever allows for a smooth integration.

You could test this by building a very simple game in Unity or unreal.