Elbow and Knee tracker locations.

[Njna the Last Rabbit Queen]

What is the anticipated time frame to have these options in the tracker setup? It's limiting the ability to use 10 point tracking in a multitude of software titles and seems like it should be a simple add in the xml/json files. Pretty please?

[Damsteri]

Probably never, as the userbase would be too small. I have six trackers (as I did some research with them), but I don't know many people that own even one. Trackers are too expensive fro common VR gamers and it seems that after the initial burst of games supporting them there haven't been many new ones.

Also, you can set your elbow and knee trackers in the game, if the game supports them. No need to be able to set them in SteamVR as games can recognize the trackers anyway. The games in question just need to have a functionality to assign any tracker to any location of the body.

[Njna the Last Rabbit Queen]

They have now been implemented and full 10 point tracking is already working in LIV. Thanks Valve!! https://twitter.com/LIV/status/1225157730773565440

[Njna the Last Rabbit Queen]

Originally posted by Damsteri:

Probably never, as the userbase would be too small. I have six trackers (as I did some research with them), but I don't know many people that own even one. Trackers are too expensive fro common VR gamers and it seems that after the initial burst of games supporting them there haven't been many new ones.

Also, you can set your elbow and knee trackers in the game, if the game supports them. No need to be able to set them in SteamVR as games can recognize the trackers anyway. The games in question just need to have a functionality to assign any tracker to any location of the body.

Nearly everything in this reply is inaccurate though. There are many people who have full body tracking with 3 trackers (waist + feet) and nearly all avatar only streamer use this setup. Game support is nice, but not required when you have overlays like LIV. And having SteamVR support it at the core removes the need for all developers to roll their own support. Please don't spread so much misinformation.

[Damsteri]

What I said was said as a VR game developer. You are talking software (mainly LIV I see), so it's purely visual. I'm talking about games where you can actually do something with your arms and legs (like kicking dinosaurs for example).

Misinformation, hah. I would never make a game that relies users having trackers. Software, maybe, but would they be commercially viable? Trackers are dead. They are too expensive, too hard to get and there is not enough games that support them. Not commercially viable to make a game that uses them. I fear about the downfall of accurate tracking overall as inside-out tracking method is coming more popular. Sure there are nice prototypes etc for full body tracking, but nothing cheap enough for common users. There has been such setups for the past 30 years "coming soon". I'm not against trackers, actually the opposite as I invented a VR movement method improvement that requires a waist tracker.

Looking from a game developer perspective having trackers recognized by LIV won't help it any way in game code. That twitter post you made tells me just that people at LIV have done good job by adding tracker support. I don't know how you connect that post to Valve. Having 10 point tracking (or more) has always been possible since the trackers were introduced (2017). Developers need to make the trackers function correctly in game for the joints and they need to support trackers (or body tracking in general terms) to have that in game as a feature. The image below shows how Unreal Engine 4 developers can see trackers (and has seen for years), I don't know about other game engines. Trackers are labeled Special 1-11 when not assigned to a role in SteamVR.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1991012176

Having designated knee and elbow trackers in SteamVR (with L/R sides) like foot and shoulder trackers forces user to label trackers, so that the user always put same trackers to same body points. That's not good. My opinion is that it's better to do it in app calibration, maybe a T-pose where code assigns physical trackers to IK-body points based on their relative locations to each others and HMD. At least I did that way, much easier to use. It would be a bad idea to tell user to switch L and R elbow trackers physically in case tje user have put them on wrong elbows while the other option would be to switch them in code causing mismatch when SteamVR L elbow is R elbow in game causing hard to debug bugs later on. It's much easier to do the calibration as above and switch Special 3 to Special 4 or whatever numbers they have got on that time. I can understand "Camera" and "Gun" tags for separate objects which have always the same tracker, but last time I tried to use that Camera it didn't work.. but that was a while ago.

I'm not big fan of tracker roles in SteamVR as those require user to make sure left is on left and right is on right, while trackers (and Vive wands) are symmetrical and could be in any place, if the programmer has done their job correctly. Maybe it's better for newcomers, but I prefer having roles disabled and do the all magic in code without any SteamVR UI limitations.

There are two options, the user can either do short ingame calibration (T-pose) to assign all trackers put on randomly or they must label trackers and make sure that they are on correct locations before they launch the app. I think the first option is better for gamers, while the second might be better for arcades or youtubers. [add many heart icons here]

[Kurtino]

Originally posted by Njna Grimsdottir:

Nearly everything in this reply is inaccurate though. There are many people who have full body tracking with 3 trackers (waist + feet) and nearly all avatar only streamer use this setup. Game support is nice, but not required when you have overlays like LIV. And having SteamVR support it at the core removes the need for all developers to roll their own support. Please don't spread so much misinformation. :winter2019happyyul::ss2heart:

Well I'm not against them adding support, but he's right in that the user base for trackers is still extremely small; streamers are not a big enough majority.

I'd love to get trackers and a green screen and invest a lot of money for a cooler experience like streamers do, but it's not even close to what the typical user will be doing, and there are barely any games that support any of this functionality for it to be worth it.

Still, this would be future proofing as I do believe it is the way forward. Once new tracking solutions are made and made way more affordable I believe it'll be the next step in tracking, particularly for avatars which Facebook seems particularly interested in. I don't think 3 point tracking will be the final standard.