When game developer CloudGate Studio got its hands on HTC Vive Tracker peripherals earlier this year, it led to players kicking dinosaurs in virtual reality. It was a fun use case, but the company has much bigger plans for this tech. Its Virtual Self plugin enables developers to use one to three Trackers to provide full-body motion-capture in VR. It will be available to demo in CloudGate’s dinosaur survival game Island 359 on December 1, and at a later date, the plugin will launch for Unreal Engine 4, with a Unity version plugin to come.
Virtual Self coincides with HTC’s announcement that players can purchase Trackers for $100 each starting today. The Tracker can turn anything into a VR peripheral. Attaching one to a tennis racquet or baseball bat will turn that object into a controller for a round of immersive sports indoors. Starting in March, developers could buy Trackers to begin experimenting with them.
But even before CloudGate got its dev kit, it was already working on a full-body solution.
Cofounder and president Steve Bowler says that they’ve been floating around the idea of figuring out full embodiment in VR since November 2015. However, CloudGate only seriously pursued it once HTC announced the Trackers at the International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January.
Bowler began working on a prototype immediately, creating makeshift Trackers using the controllers that come with the Vive headset. He and cofounder Jeremy Chapman both have decades of experience with motion capture, and they figured that they only needed to track six points on a player’s body to create a realistic representation of it in VR: the hands, head, two feet, and hips.
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Source: Venture Beat