While their main role is leg tracking, Pico Motion Trackers can also be used for object tracking.
Pico Motion Trackers come as a pair with ankle straps for £80 in the UK and €90 in Europe, designed to allow you to easily add leg tracking to Pico 4 Ultra, Pico 4, and Pico Neo 3 in apps like VRChat and soon Blade & Sorcery: Nomad. But the trackers can also be strapped to objects too, and can even be easily detached from their ankle strap cradles for custom solutions.
This is possible because unlike other cheap trackers such as Sony’s Mocopi, Pico Motion Trackers have 12 infrared LEDs each, which are 6DoF positionally tracked by the headset. They’re essentially mini VR controllers without the buttons, thumbstick, and triggers.
Pico Motion Trackers detach from their ankle mount cradle.
ByteDance says Pico object tracking could be used for held objects like table tennis paddles, baseball bats, and bows, particularly useful for location-based entertainment (LBE) venues, or just attached to your wrists to increase the quality of hand tracking.
HTC has a similar product, Vive Wrist Tracker, which can also be used for custom tracked objects. But a unique feature of Pico Motion Trackers allows much deeper integrations.
The USB-C port of Pico Motion Trackers is not only for charging, but is also a data port which developers can access to pass through data from attached devices. This enables completely custom tracked controllers with buttons, triggers, sticks, and even haptics, with positional tracking handled by the attached Pico Motion Tracker. For example, an LBE venue could create a rifle with a trigger and haptic motor and attach a Pico Motion Tracker, or a business could attach one to a stylus and pass through its tip pressure state.
One limitation is that object tracking and leg tracking can’t be used together. You either have the trackers on your ankles, or you have them attached to arbitrary objects, but not both at the same time.
Still, the ability to build custom tracked objects with USB-C data passed through for a relatively low cost, and without base stations, is a significant milestone for the industry, and should lower the cost of custom tracked object solutions in both the LBE and enterprise markets.
